Kentucky African American Civil War Soldiers Project
While researching The Reckoning radio series, we learned that an unusual amount of information is available for Black men from Kentucky who served in the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). The reason for this is that enslavers in Kentucky and other slave states that remained in the Union were promised $300 in compensation for each enslaved man they “lost” to the Union Army. A system of forms and ledger books was created to keep track of information about formerly enslaved soldiers so that their previous enslavers could file compensation claims.
What makes these documents so valuable is that, for every man listed who was enslaved, they provide us with an array of facts about him that would otherwise be preserved nowhere else: his first and last name, his birth year, his birth location, when and where he enlisted, and the name of his enslaver. These facts can unlock many other previously hidden documents about enslaved people from Kentucky, providing their descendants with an unprecedented amount of information about their ancestors.
Our eventual goal is to use these documents to research every African American man who either enlisted in Kentucky or was born in Kentucky but enlisted elsewhere. However, our starting point has been to focus on approximately 750 soldiers from nine counties in Kentucky that surround Louisville. To do this, we have used a variety of archival documents, including slave schedules, church records, wills, estate inventories, pension documents, census data, and newspaper articles, to create a database record for each soldier and his family with links to primary source documents as well as a family tree. The results of this research are published in a searchable database, with new information being added regularly.
You can explore the database in a variety of ways. You can browse through the soldiers’ records, either by county or regiment. You can also search for a particular name, either for a soldier or a person who enslaved one or more of the soldiers. You can also view all of the over 20,000 basic military records we have found for Kentucky’s Black Civil War soldiers in the form of a spreadsheet. And we have indexed hundreds of military pension files for Kentucky’s U.S. Colored Troops soldiers and their family members, which can be viewed here.
We have also commissioned a series of Soldier Stories from African American writers, many of which feature photographs of individual soldiers and archival documents relating to their military service and their lives after the Civil War.
Major funding for this project was provided by the American Historical Association, Brown-Forman, J. Graham Brown Foundation, Community Foundation of Louisville, Gheens Foundation, Hardscuffle, Inc., Humana Foundation, Kentucky Arts Council, and LG&E/KU.
Watch more videos in our Kentucky African American Civil War Soldiers Project playlist on Youtube.