United States Colored Troops: 178,000 Men Who Faced Execution if Captured

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More than 178,000 men enlisted in the United States Colored Troops knowing the Confederacy had promised to treat them not as prisoners of war but as armed insurrectionists. This episode traces how a reluctant Union government came to arm Black soldiers, from General Benjamin Butler declaring escaped slaves contraband of war at Fort Monroe, through Lincoln's fear of losing the border states, to the Emancipation Proclamation and the creation of the Bureau of Colored Troops in 1863.

Inside the Union Army, USCT soldiers faced a glass ceiling on rank, white officers screened by General Silas Casey's examining board, and a pay gap of $7 against $13 a month that entire regiments protested by refusing pay for over a year. On the battlefield, the Confederate policy of May 1863 led to massacres at Fort Pillow, the Crater, and Olustee, halted the Dix-Hill prisoner exchange, and pushed the Union to adopt the Lieber Code. The episode closes with the Medal of Honor stories, the Buffalo Soldier regiments, and the argument that the USCT was the largest slave rebellion in modern history.

• Only about 110 Black soldiers received officer commissions, mostly as chaplains and surgeons, though one Kansas light artillery battery was led entirely by Black officers.
• The first official USCT engagement came at Island Mound, Missouri, in late 1862, before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.
• USCT mortality ran about 20.5 percent, roughly 35 percent higher than regular white troops, with over 36,000 deaths.
• Sergeant William Harvey Carney carried the colors at Fort Wagner while wounded and waited 37 years for his Medal of Honor.
• Corporal Andrew Jackson Smith, who saved his regiment's colors at Honey Hill, was not awarded the Medal of Honor until 2001.