Categorically, the USCT regiments are terribly difficult to research. Local men from here in Rutherford County TN were recruited into the 13th USCTI. After the war, the area around what would become Stones River NB became the Cemetery Community. Churches founded at that time are still active & occupy the original location. 20 years ago, group of local men formed the 13th USCTI reenactor regiment.
The founders included the former head of the TN State Historical Commission. These were Professional people living in a university town with access to libraries, archives & historians willing to help with research. It proved a very frustrating exercise.
The well documented effort of influential historians from Vanderbilt & the University of the South at the turn of the 20th Century to write self-liberated people out of the narrative was one obstacle that they ran into. In TN schools, CW history was taught from Lost Cause counter factual pamphlets produced by the UDC.., “Your Friend the Klan” was one my mother always remembered because her mother despised Kluxers. Needless to say, the heroic battle record of the 13th USCTI was not a part of the UDC’s CW narrative. White people doing everything they could to erase the record is one thing, what happened in the black community is quite another.
The simple reason given for the dearth of oral history about USCT ancestors is that black families were too busy coping with reconstruction & Jim Crow to get nostalgic about slave times & CW history. I have sat with local folks who were researching their USCT ancestry & we all looked like a collection of bobble heads. Everybody sits there shaking their heads.
To a certain degree, the worm has turned. There is a USCT statue in the National Cemetery in Nashville. The Cemetery Community & the 111th USCTI’s participation in the creation of Stones River National Cemetery is the subject of weekly programs. Local decedents participate in those programs, something unheard of previously. In Franklin TN, over the vociferous objections of local UDC & SCV chapters, a statue honoring the participation of local blacks in their liberation will be erected. Bit by bit, the historic record is being filled in.
Of course, there are still people who never pass up a chance to dismiss the USCT’s as inferior soldiers. I mean no disrespect, but deliberately or not, the reference to the 1st South Carolina in this thread is an example worth noting. Anybody unfamiliar with that unit would assume that it is a valid example of the inferiority of USCT regiments. Nothing could be further from the truth
A knowledge person is aware that the 1st South Carolina predated the creation of the USCT. It was a Sea Island self-liberated slave militia. As such, the membership was remarkably fluid. The officer’s depiction of the 1st’s operations is, if anything, generous. It is, of course, no commentary of any kind about units like the 13th. Eventually, some of the 1st Carolina veterans formed up with USCT regiments.
Like all CW topics, new evidence about USCT topics comes out of attics now & again. Despite archivists that deliberately scrubbed the record & the vexed issue of largely illiterate participants, the true narrative of the USCT in the CW is an ongoing process.