Wisconsin African Americans in the Civil War

Jenny Pederson: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today’s “History Sandwiched In.” My name is Jenny Pederson, and I am the public programs manager for the Wisconsin Historical Society.

I also want to take a moment to thank Wisconsin Historical Society Press for their support in identifying and suggesting authors and titles for this program series. And we also have a big thank you to PBS Wisconsin, who is here today to record and stream, with Jeff’s permission, his lecture and include it in University Place programming, which will be available on PBS Wisconsin channels as well as online.

A couple notes about that. If you are to look for future– for this program in the future, you will find it under a program titled “Wisconsin African Americans in the Civil War.”

Now I officially transition into our welcome. So, I do want to say thank you again and a big welcome to you all for coming to today’s program. A quick note that opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the society’s employees.

And now for who you are all here today to see. It is a pleasure to welcome author, educator, and historian Jeff Kannel.

Jeff: Correct.

Jenny: Yes! [Jeff chuckles] We did a little session on pronunciations before. Who is presenting “Make Way for Liberty: Wisconsin African Americans in the Civil War.” Jeff’s presentation today is based on his book of the same name, as seen up here, which was originally published in October 2020 through the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, and is the winner of the 2021 Book of Merit Award from the Board of Curators, Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Before we hand over the microphone, I am excited to share a brief biography of our speaker. Jeff Kannel is a retired physical therapist and educator. He was a tour guide at the Civil War Museum in Kenosha from 2011 to 2018. He has spoken about African American Civil War soldiers in more than two dozen towns around the state. In addition to Make Way for Liberty, Jeff is also co-author, with Victoria Tashjian, of “Henry Sink: Settler, Soldier, Citizen” for the Wisconsin Magazine of History in 2018.

Please join me in welcoming Jeff, and enjoy the presentation.

[audience applauding]

Jeff: All right, well, thank you all for coming, and thanks to the Historical Society for inviting me to appear here.

The history and the stories of the African Americans who served in the Civil War on the Union side have unfortunately been forgotten and nearly erased until the last few decades. I started doing research on these men about 14 years ago while I was working as a tour guide at the museum in Kenosha. I met a group of reenactors from Milwaukee who were representing Company F of the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry, and I was embarrassed to admit to them that I didn’t know anything about Black men serving from Wisconsin in the Civil War. So I started doing research on that company, and, just, it spread out from there.

This is a history that really needs to be brought back in, brought back to light, to fill out this history of our state and country. And I’m glad to have had the opportunity to put this book together and to put these presentations together. These men were true freedom fighters.

Today, I’ll be introducing you to seven of the men, over 700 men, who served from Wisconsin in the Civil War, African American men. Six of these men appear on the covers, front and back covers, of the book. And the seventh one, I’ll start with first, is a man by the name of Oscar McClellan.

And I include him for three reasons. First, the stories he told of his enslavement need to be remembered. He was born enslaved in Virginia. At age 14, he was sold away from his parents to Kentucky and never saw them again. In Kentucky, at age 26, he married. Again, it was a marriage during slavery, so not one legally recognized. But he married, they had a son. When the son turned 14, he was sold away from them. And shortly after the son was taken away, his wife died. So, this man, while enslaved, had his family ripped away from him twice.

In 1862, when the war began, he saw a chance to escape when the 13th Wisconsin Infantry came near to where he worked. He escaped to them, worked with them for a while, and returned to Wisconsin with them when they were furloughed. So he came back to Sharon, a small town in Walworth County.

Now, here’s the second reason I wanted to talk about him. He enlisted in Marengo, Illinois. So, he was in Wisconsin. Why’d he enlist in Marengo, Illinois? Well, when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, part two of that was he finally opened the state militias and the federal army to Black men. Prior to that, they were not allowed to join. With the Emancipation Proclamation, the U.S. Colored Troops were formed. States started recruiting and accepting Black volunteers, but not Wisconsin. For all of 1863, no. Into 1864, no.

So, Wisconsin was, a lot of these men knew, “Well, Wisconsin isn’t taking us in,” so men started leaving the state to volunteer. And when those numbers started going up and up, “Well, I guess we’ll start recruiting them. We’ll accept them as volunteers.” So he enlisted, actually, in August of 1864, after Wisconsin began accepting volunteers, so I’m not sure if he just made that decision because he assumed Wisconsin still wasn’t accepting them or because Marengo was closer than Madison, which it was.

So he was assigned to the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry, which you’ll hear about a lot today, Company D. He was present at the final battle in Virginia, where Lee’s army surrendered at Appomattox, and I’ll talk about that a lot more later. He returned to Sharon, returned to Walworth County, ended up living in Delavan, where he worked as a farm laborer. He married again, but they never had children. He worked as a farm laborer, and, together, he and his wife had a large vegetable garden, which they supplemented his farm income by selling produce during the summer months.

The third point I wanted to make about this man, again, as a representative of a lot of the veterans, is he was the founder, donor of the land, and one of the primary builders of the Delavan African Methodist Episcopal Church, which is still a functioning congregation, by the way. The church was built right next to their house on land that he donated. This picture is the only known picture of him, and it was probably taken during the construction. It’s from a newspaper. The construction was in 1896-97. He died in 1898.

Oscar McClellan received an invalid pension for his disabilities, I believe his was old age, though, from his service time. He was a member of the local GAR post. GAR was the Grand Army of the Republic, which was the organization of Union Veterans of the Civil War, and I’ll talk more about that later, too. So, he’s the one who is not on the cover.

Now we’ll go on to the people on the cover. John J. Valentine was born in Stokes County, North Carolina, in 1821. He was born free. Now, he was born in North Carolina, right? But in that part of North Carolina and the adjoining part of Virginia, there were significant numbers of free Blacks in those years, in the 1820s. Something happened in 1830 to change that, and that was Nat Turner’s rebellion, which took place in that area, and it was no longer possible for those families to stay as free Black citizens in that area, so almost all of them moved on to somewhere else. A number of the other servicemen from Wisconsin also had that history of coming from that area of North Carolina and Virginia. But the families left after Nat Turner’s rebellion was crushed.

So the Valentine family moved to Ohio, and in Ohio, John married Louisa, and in 1847, the entire family and the entire family of his uncle and aunt moved to Wisconsin. All of them were farmers, with the exception of John and Louisa, who moved to Janesville, and he was a cook in a restaurant in Janesville.

Now, at age 42, in January of 1865, late in the war, he enlisted. He was in the 17th U.S. Colored Infantry. There were 17 men from Wisconsin who were in that regiment, and their age spread kind of reflects the problem that the Union had in recruiting. Seven of the men were 35 or over. Two of the men were 16. So, again, if you think about that, look at that, think about the fact that, at the end of the war, 10% of the men in uniform, in the blue uniforms of the Union, were African American. What if they had not opened the army to them? Where would the Union have been without their service?

Now, besides John Valentine, his brother Julius left Wisconsin earlier in the war, went to Illinois, and served in the 29th Colored Infantry, which was formed in Illinois. His brother-in-law, William McGraw, served with him in the 17th. His nephew John served as a cook with the 39th Wisconsin Infantry, and another nephew, Shadrach, left the state, volunteered in Michigan, served in the 102nd U.S. Colored Infantry, and died from disease while in service. He’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery, which some of you may know is on land that belonged to General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy prior to the war. So, his plantation was seized and became the the center of the Arlington National Cemetery. From the very beginning of that cemetery, both Black and white servicemen who died were buried, and several other Wisconsin men were buried, Black men were buried, at Arlington.

Now, Valentine served one year. He did garrison duty at forts around Nashville. He returned to Wisconsin, came back to Janesville initially, and he and his brother-in-law were hotel cooks again. They moved to Milton, did the same kind of work, and then moved to Waukesha. Now, in Waukesha, John Valentine became the owner of a restaurant, confectionery, and, later on, added a hotel business to his location. He was a successful businessman, and appears in many ways to have been very widely respected in that community.

He was a GAR member, and I’m gonna talk about that a little bit here now. The GAR, the veterans organization, was open to any honorably discharged Union veteran. The other condition was their membership application had to be accepted by a vote of the members of the local post. As I was doing the research on this, it surprised me how many of these men were members of predominantly white GAR posts in Wisconsin. So I thought about it. Well, in most of those cases, they would have been the only Black member of the post, although there was a post in Madison that had at least five Black members at one point. But, again, it reflects the fact that these guys were respected to some degree for their service in the Civil War.

Notice also on his vest the ribbons and medals. Those are GAR medals. And you’ll see those on a number of the other men, too. Four of the six men on the cover were members of the GAR, and I believe almost all of them have the medals on, and I’ll explain why that was a little bit later.

Now, John Valentine also received an old-age pension, and, late in life– I want to talk a little bit about Charles Henry Taylor. He was a veteran, also of company D of the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry. He served with Oscar McClellan, the first soldier we talked about. He lived in Madison, a few blocks from here. In the 1880s, he was getting an invalid pension because of disability. He also became unable to take care of his own finances, so he had a guardian appointed for him. There were problems with that guardian. He petitioned for a new one, and his new guardian became John Valentine, a veteran, another veteran. And in the last year and a half he lived, he went and lived with the Valentine family in Waukesha, and he’s buried in Prairie Home Cemetery in Waukesha.

I mention this because this will come up with every one of these men we’ve talked about. In doing original, a lot of the reading originally on U.S. colored troops and general histories of the Civil War, it was stated that, well, the Black soldiers didn’t stay in touch with each other because they didn’t write regimental histories and they didn’t have reunions and they didn’t have regimental associations. But as we look through what these guys did, they were tied to each other, and it had nothing to do with what regiment they were in or what company they were in or even where they lived. They were tied to each other because of their service. When they moved, they moved to places where other veterans were. When they were in trouble, they went to each other. They supported each other. So, I think that looking at the history of the Wisconsin veterans, that kind of general statement is really not true. They were very connected to each other and supportive of each other.

Next one is Thomas Greene. He was enslaved in Missouri and escaped. He had an unusual escape. He was one of the only people who escaped enslavement on the Overground Railroad. He had a different relationship with his owner from Oscar McClellan in that when he was done with the work demanded of him by his owner, he worked out, but was allowed to keep the money he earned. So he saved, over a long period of time, enough money to come to Wisconsin by train.

On the trip, he came with an extended group of people. When they arrived here, they discovered that everything in their trunks had been stolen while it was on the train. So, they had some money left, but all of their clothes and all of their other property had been stolen from them. He ended up in Grant County in a community named Pleasant Ridge, which was a hilltop Black farming community almost entirely made up of formerly enslaved people.

This is different from the Cheyenne Valley community, two counties north, in Vernon County, where many of the people there– First of all, it was a multiracial settlement, and, secondly, many of the people in that community had been born free. There were some formerly enslaved people there, but most of the founders of the Vernon County, Cheyenne Valley, settlement, were born free.

Now, Pleasant Ridge in Grant County was about 30 miles from Prairie du Chien. In October of 1864, Thomas Greene walked those 30 miles to volunteer for the army. He was sent to Madison to Camp Randall, which was where all the volunteers after June of 1864, all the volunteers, Black or white, went to Madison for initial training. And then people like Valentine or Thomas Greene and the other men I’m gonna talk about were sent from there to St. Louis, where they were assigned to a company and a regiment.

His unit served a year, and, again, they did garrison duties, manning forts in various locations in Kentucky. When he came back, he married Hattie Shepard, who was also from the Pleasant Ridge community. She was the daughter of Charles Shepard, who died in service during the war, and her brother also died in service during the war, both from disease. They had at least 10 children. They also raised two nieces. And he owned a farm. At the nearest documentation I can find, he had at least 60 acres. I believe he had a lot more than that at one point. But in 1895, in this community, there were over 700 acres of land owned by Black farmers.

This was a successful community, agricultural settlement, about five miles west of Lancaster, if you know where Lancaster is. They built a church on donated land. They built a school. And the school was good enough that white families surrounding the community sent their kids there. They got a good education. And this is one of the things that, in the end, was kind of the demise of the community. The kids were educated, they were all literate. Thomas Greene never learned to read or write, but their children did, and many of them went on to be teachers. One became a dentist, a Pullman porter.

The combination of not wanting to continue farming and also the fact that it started as such a small community, after a generation or two, there were no marriageable partners anymore within the community. Led to a lot of them leaving for cities.

There was a big event that happened in that community in early August, and it took place on Thomas Greene’s farm. There was a barbecue that was attended by 600 to 800 people every year. Now, when you think about this community, the Black community on Pleasant Ridge never reached even 200 people. There were a lot of white people who came to this, who were welcome to it, it was a big event. And in the history of it, there reportedly were no incidents or negative events. This was written up in the NAACP’s national magazine, The Crisis, in 1830.

The date for it is kind of interesting. They always had it in early August. And this goes back to the 1830s, when slavery was abolished on the British islands in the Caribbean. The date that this happened was celebrated within Black communities in the U.S. in hopes that the same thing might happen here someday. After the Civil War, people kept celebrating Emancipation Day in August, one of the reasons for that being it’s no fun to have a picnic in January in Wisconsin. [audience laughing]

So these typically had a barbecue, baseball game, parades, music, a dance, everything. They were in a lot of communities in the state in the 1880s, and again, this reflects the fact that, in the 19th century, the African Americans in Wisconsin lived on farms and in small towns, not in cities.

Thomas Greene also received an old-age pension. He died in 1937, which, when you think about it, is only 10 years before I was born. So it’s not… You know, when you think about it that way, it’s not that ancient, this history.

The picture on the right is a view of the African American settlement at Old World Wisconsin, the state historical park. This was done in the late 1890s. The building you can see there is a replica of the church that they built at Pleasant Ridge. There’s another building nearby there that is an actual outbuilding that was connected to the church that was moved from Pleasant Ridge to Old World Wisconsin. And the gravestones, there’s not a real cemetery there. The stones are replicas of the tombstones in the cemetery that still stands at Pleasant Ridge, and the one in the front here is the tombstone of Thomas Grimes, who was also a Civil War veteran. And he has an interesting story, but I can’t go into it here because I have limited time.

So, our next veteran is Henry Sink. He’s the one I probably know the best, because he’s the one about whom I co-authored an article for the Wisconsin Magazine of History. He was born– and I’ll mention on top. He was a member of Company F, 29th U.S. Colored Infantry. That company was known as the Milwaukee Company and is the only unit of the U.S. Colored Troops that was recognized by the the War Department in Washington as a Wisconsin unit.

So, Henry Sink was born enslaved in Arkansas. He escaped during the war and lived in Rosendale and Fond du Lac, nearby each other, and did farm labor. Now, when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he and most of his generals were not looking at future Black troops as combat soldiers. They were looking at, they were going to use them as support troops, you know, manning forts, guarding supply lines, railroads, et cetera, prisoner of war camps, things like that. Most of them, like Thomas Greene and John Valentine, did garrison duty, manning forts that had already been captured. But there are a good number of, in fact, many thousands of the U.S. Colored Troops saw combat, including two regiments from Wisconsin that had a number of men from Wisconsin. One of them was the 29th.

When the Black troops were called into duty, as in combat, they performed well, as you, if you’ve seen the movie Glory, which was about the 54th Massachusetts and the first battle that they were in, in the Carolinas, near Charleston. There were Wisconsin men in that unit, too. Among the men who left the state were men in the 54th and 55th Massachusetts.

So, Henry Sink is in the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry. His company arrives near Petersburg, Virginia, in the middle of July and finds out, “Oh, we’re going to lead an attack on Petersburg in two weeks.” Until they got there, they really hadn’t handled weapons with live ammunition, so they were kind of green, but they wanted to go, so they performed maneuvers that they would do on the day of the battle.

What was going to happen was a group of miners, soldiers who were miners, coal miners, from Pennsylvania dug a tunnel underneath Confederate lines, filled it with explosives. On the early morning of the 29th, they blew it up. Huge crater, which is where the battle got its name. The division of the U.S. Colored Troops was supposed to lead the immediate initial attack. The night before, General Meade and General Grant overrode that decision, and they drew straws to assign which unit was going to lead the attack. They assigned it to a habitually drunken general of a tired regiment, or a tired division, and after the crater blew up, they did nothing but block the pathways or entryways which the soldiers behind them could use to advance. A number of them went up and saw the crater. “Oh, look at that thing.” And they went down in the crater. So they didn’t take advantage of it at all.

The division of the U.S. Colored Troops wanted to take the lead that they weren’t allowed to. Four hours after the explosion, the Confederates have regrouped, but now the U.S. Colored Troops are at a point where they can move forward, and they do anyway, even though it’s pretty much hopeless at that point. And there’s a letter to the editor in a, I believe it was a Sheboygan paper from a white soldier from Wisconsin saying, “It just pained me to watch these guys. They had no hope of winning at all, but they went in absolutely enthusiastic and aggressive, and they took heavy casualties.”

What they were trying to do was follow their original plan, but it was four hours too late. So, in the Battle of the Crater, 10 Wisconsin men died. At least 23 others were wounded, including Henry Sink. He took a Mini ball to his left elbow so that his left elbow, arm, for life was in this position. He couldn’t straighten or bend his elbow. He couldn’t turn his palm over. So he was discharged for disability, and pensioned, and I want to mention here, his pension was– The pensions that soldiers received were studied in the last about 20 years and found that a Black veteran with a said disability would receive less pension per month than a white soldier with an equivalent disability. So, pensions were available to both Black and white soldiers, but there was an inequality in distributing them.

Now, when he returned, Henry Sink went to work in a factory in Fond du Lac, a sawmill, owned by a man named J.Q. Griffith, who, during the war, paid $5 a month to the families of all employees who volunteered to serve in the war. After the war, he hired all those guys back, and he even hired disabled veterans like Henry Sink. His job was on maintenance, tending the fires, but he also hired an able-bodied Black veteran to work in the factory, too. This was very unusual. In the factories in Wisconsin in the late 1800s, it was immigrants who were getting the jobs, not African Americans. That’s true in Milwaukee, too. But he was hired there, worked there. He later lived in De Pere, in Green Bay. In De Pere, he owned a home, not a very fancy one, but it was his.

He was married three times, and one of his– his second wife was the widow of another veteran. So, again, these marriage and family connections between these guys were strong. He was a member of the GAR, as you can see from his badge. He also was a resident for a short time of the King soldiers’ home in Waupaca, but as the end of his life came, he went back to Fond du Lac, stayed with some relatives there, and died there in 1905.

Benjamin Butts is an interesting story, too. He was born enslaved in Virginia. Now, young man, back row, how old are you?

Attendee 1: The same age.

Attendee 2: Fourteen.

Jeff: How old?

Attendee 2: Fourteen.

Jeff: Fourteen? Well, he was younger than you. At age 12, he escaped. He was enslaved near Petersburg, Virginia. He escaped at age 12 to the 5th Wisconsin Infantry. He was with them for not a long time. And when they came back to Wisconsin, he came back with them. He was not a rostered soldier, but he’s here as basically representative of the fact that I have about 180, 190 African Americans who were employed by Wisconsin regiments, and either were on the rosters or I found them in other ways. So, he was one I found in other ways ’cause he wasn’t a rostered soldier, and that was an issue for many men later on. I’ll tell you why later.

So he came back to Wisconsin, first to Richland County and eventually to Madison. He married Amy or Anna Roberts– she went by both names– who was the daughter of veteran Aaron Roberts, who lived in that Cheyenne Valley community in Vernon County. In Madison, he was a barber. In fact, his barber shop was at 5 North Pinckney, which we could throw a rock from here and hit it. Very close by. He also worked as a valet and doorman for a number of prominent business and political officials, and among his clients was Robert M. La Follette, the governor and future senator. So, he was connected to some important famous people here.

In his last 30 years, he worked as a messenger for the Wisconsin Historical Society. Now, unusual. I have two pictures of him. One is a formal portrait later in life, but one’s a pretty young one. I have very few pictures like this of any of the soldiers, but that’s a nice young picture of him, probably before he was married, or maybe it’s from when he was married. I don’t know.

Now, Amy, his wife, I found listed as one of the members or founders of the Douglass Literary Society. I haven’t found out exactly what that was. I was kind of assuming, well, this must be like a book club or something like that, or a writers’ group or something. And that might be true. But the only other concrete thing I found about that is this group is listed as the moving force behind the formation of St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Madison. Again, these, again, the wives, also, but these guys were often involved in the religious life of their community as well.

Now, they had a son, they had two children. They had a son, Leo, who did two interesting things. Again, Benny Butts was enslaved ’til age 12. He did learn to read and write in Richland County. He attended school and learned to read and write. Leo went to the University of Wisconsin. He’s the first African American graduate of the UW pharmacy school.

A couple months ago, I found a really interesting book called Settlin’ by Muriel Simms. Wonderful book. You know, my research comes up to the ’20s or ’30s, and she does oral histories with people since then. But there’s a lot of connections between the people I researched and the people that she talked to. But one of the things in common between them is that the people she talked to often in Madison had to work in jobs well below their qualifications, well below their education. And that’s the case with Leo Butts. UW pharmacy school graduate. Couldn’t run a pharmacy in Madison. Not enough support for it. He moved to Gary, Indiana, where he had a thriving pharmacy until the Depression hit, at which point there was no money in it anymore. He became a mail carrier during the Depression years.

Now, the other thing he did was he played football. He was the first African American to play varsity football for the Badgers. So there you go. And he was the son and grandson of a Civil War veteran.

In looking through rosters of Madison GAR posts, I never found Benjamin Butts listed on any of the rosters. I’m sure if he had applied, he would have been accepted, but he may not have applied because he may not have considered his service equivalent to those guys who had served two or three years, ’cause, his, again, his time, he was only 12 years old, his time was short.

Okay, the last two men I’m talking about both lived in Appleton for most of their post-war lives. Horace Artis, also written “Artist,” was in the 31st U.S. Colored Infantry. He was born enslaved in Virginia near Appomattox. I keep telling you, we’re gonna come back to Appomattox. We are, okay? But this is one of the links. That’s where he was enslaved. He married while he was at Appomattox, again, a marriage during slavery, so not legally recognized, but they remained married for life.

In 1862, they escaped together to Washington, D.C., where he enlisted not long after that, joined the 31st, and in April of 1865, he found himself back at Appomattox, but not as a slave anymore, but as a soldier fighting to get rid of slavery.

After the war, they moved to Outagamie County. They worked on farms around Shiocton for a while. Then he worked as a laborer in Appleton for various individuals or companies and worked for a long time for the Appleton Water Utility. He was a GAR member. There’s the badge again. And they had a son, Oliver, who married the daughter of veteran Anderson Reese from Fond du Lac.

His wife’s name was Bercina, and in the 1880s, she did an interview with one of the Appleton newspapers, and this is a little clip from the newspaper of her telling her story. “She was placed under a barrel and kept there all day and all night, being fed on crusts and scraps like a dog. Repeated floggings literally covered her back with scars, which she will carry to her grave.”

There are people going around saying that slavery was beneficial to the enslaved people, and we need to keep this in mind as the reality and not the excellent job training they may have gotten during their years of enslavement. Bercina died in 1909, and Horace died a year later, in 1910.

Okay, Appomattox, finally. Appomattox was the final large battle in Virginia. It was the last battle fought by Robert E. Lee’s army. The 31st, in which Horace Artis served, and the 29th, in which over 100 Wisconsin men served, were part of a division of U.S. Colored Troops who marched all night, April 8 and 9, through the entire night and arrived at Appomattox just in time to cut off Robert E. Lee’s only escape route, continue south, and try and hook up with Joe Johnston’s army, which was still fighting General Sherman in the Carolinas. Their march all night is what sealed off Lee and basically ended the Civil War.

George Washington Williams was an African American historian who wrote in the 1880s that the last guns fired at Robert E. Lee’s army were in the hands of Negro soldiers, and over 100 of them were from right here in Wisconsin.

Now, I went to Appomattox in 2017, went through this complex. It was very interesting. Visitors center, I saw the movie, looked around in the visitors center, and there was no mention anywhere of the U.S. Colored Troops, and there was one picture of an African American man, and, reading the caption, it said he was there as the slave of a Confederate general. There were thousands of U.S. Colored Troops there. That’s the only picture and the only mention of an African American man in the visitors center.

But I saw on the map there was an exhibit somewhere down over here, just off the edge, on the U.S. Colored Troops and slavery in the Appomattox area. So, I went down there, and it was padlocked. It was locked. So I went back up to the visitors center and asked to be let in, and they let me in. Somebody came down with me and opened the padlock. Walked in, nice display, including when you walk right in the door, a huge picture of Horace Artis. Wow! It doesn’t mention the fact that he went to Wisconsin, but, oh, that’s really cool! And, again, they explained, you know, his enlistment, enslavement, his enlistment. He’s back here at the final battle at Appomattox. So, I came back out. The guy padlocked the door again. I said, “Why do you keep it locked?” “Well, hardly anybody ever goes in here.” “Well, it’s ’cause you keep it locked.” [audience laughing]

So I went up and asked about this, and I said, “Well, why aren’t, why is there no mention whatsoever of African Americans in this display?” He said, “Well, we did talk about them in the movie.” Yeah, that’s true, but nothing in the displays. And he said, “Well, we have to be careful of the sensibilities of our neighbors around here.” Well, only certain neighbors, I guess, the white supremacist neighbors, ’cause there are still Black people living in the area. But, anyway, I wrote a letter to the director after that and never heard back. So if any of you go to Appomattox, check this out and see what’s there.

Joseph Ellmore was born free in Illinois. His death certificate says his father was born in Germany and his mother was born in Abyssinia, which is the old name for Ethiopia. So, he had an interesting background. Before the war, he’s living in La Crosse, working in a butcher shop with Michael Brady, who also served in the Civil War in the same regiment with John Valentine. He volunteered at La Crosse, shipped to Madison. He never got out of Camp Randall. He had an accident there, fell, wrecked his left shoulder, broke his left scapula, shoulder blade, so his service time he spent in Madison working in the post hospital.

He went back to La Crosse after the war, went back to work with Michael Brady again in the butcher shop, and Brady later wrote in Ellmore’s pension files that after the war, he couldn’t do the work anymore. His left arm was just too damaged and too weak for him to do butcher work anymore, so he ended up moving to a long list of places. He lived in St. Paul, Dubuque, Eau Claire, Madison, Oshkosh, and finally, Appleton. Somewhere along the way, he became a barber, which turned out to be a work he could do and do well.

He married Emma. They had no children. But they had parties at their house, which included, in Appleton again, the leaders of both the Black and white communities. They were very popular, highly attended, unique situation. This is in the 1880s, 1890s. So they were kind of famous for that. He was also an agent for the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, which was a weekly African American-owned newspaper in Milwaukee. And the picture of Emma is from a December 1904 issue of that newspaper.

Ellmore died in 1913. His obituary named him as the dean of local barbers. Now, when he died, Emma did not get a widow’s pension. Joseph had an invalid pension because of his injury, but Emma did not get one because Joseph had served less than 90 days. Technicality, but she never got one.

In 1899, this is kind of following up on the Ellmore story. 1899, a woman named Mary Cleggett wrote a letter to the editor of one of the Appleton papers from Arkansas, and it was kind of a nostalgic letter for how much she missed being there and being now in Arkansas, where Jim Crow segregation was now fully in place. She was the daughter of William Cleggett, who was an employee of a Wisconsin regiment for a while early in the war, and in her letter, she mentions the Ellmores and the parties they held, and describes it as a sharp contrast with Arkansas. Even in Appleton, it was almost a Black aristocracy. People who were accepted by the white community and, you know, had social relations with them.

A few weeks later, there was a letter to the editor from a white woman from Appleton who had just gone south, and in the letter, she makes a comment that’s personally directed to one of the daughters of Horace and Bercina Artis, and she says to her, “If you have a home in Wisconsin where you can breathe the free air of liberty, for God’s sake, stay there. Don’t come south.”

Now take a look at the clipping on the right. That was 1899. 1916, William S. Cleggett, Mary’s father, “The only Negro in Appleton died last night.” How did we go from the Black aristocracy to the last Negro in Appleton? This was not an isolated situation. This happened all over Wisconsin. It happened all over the North.

In the same years that Jim Crow segregation was being implemented in the South, Black civil rights in the North were going backwards as well. One of the cases that I remember, Wisconsin passed a civil rights law, 1895, the same year that the “separate but equal” decision by the Supreme Court was made. So you might say, “Well, that was good. That was progress.” But to get the law passed, the penalty for violating the law was a $5 fine.

So, John Miles, a Black veteran from Milwaukee, went to the Schlitz beer garden in Milwaukee, big social gathering place, and was denied entry. He sued based on the civil rights law. He won. The Schlitz beer garden was fined $5, and they went on discriminating. The $5 fine was no deterrent at all. It was a totally ineffective law.

So… I found newspaper clippings like this in many towns where, when the last veteran died, he was also the last African American living in town. Lake Mills, Portage. Where else, Milton, a number of cities. Those communities disappeared. In 1870, Fond du Lac had the largest Black population in Wisconsin, bigger than Milwaukee, bigger than Madison. By 1920, it was single digits, and those that were left were pretty much run out when the KKK had its statewide rally a few blocks from the Black church in Fond du Lac.

So, this was, it wasn’t an accident. Again, some of the movement away from the small towns was because of what I talked about before at Pleasant Ridge. The educational system was so good. For the kids, they had opportunities in cities that they didn’t have staying on the farm. But some of it was hostility. Some of it was, some was hostility. Some of it was just “Eh, I just don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore.” It was shunning or it was, just a distancing that could be felt, and so the communities died. They fell apart.

Now… I’ve got one more, a couple more things to talk about, and I’ll open it up for questions. As we went through these men, all these guys were privates, right? There were a number of Wisconsin men who served as sergeants, corporals, hospital stewards, or commissary sergeants, though there were men of higher rank among the Black soldiers from Wisconsin. But the highest rank you could get to was sergeant. Everyone in the U.S. Colored Troops from lieutenant up had to be white.

All of these men are buried in Wisconsin, and all of them have gravestones or tombstones. Charles Henry Taylor, the one who John Valentine served as a guardian for, is in an unmarked grave, but I’m working with a group in Waukesha to get his grave marked now. There have been some others that we’ve found, too, where we’ve gotten grave markers for soldiers who are buried in unmarked graves.

Four of them were members of the GAR, the four guys who had their badges on. Benny Butts was not. Thomas Greene was not. Joseph Ellmore may have been. I just have not been able to document whether or not he was.

All of them received invalid or old-age pensions, except for Benjamin Butts. Again, because he was not a rostered soldier, he didn’t qualify for a pension. It didn’t matter what you did. If your name wasn’t on the roster, you got no pension. Now, people like him, though, I’ll clarify, people like him, though, there were a number of these guys who were employees, on the roster, not on the roster, who were accepted as GAR members ’cause the white veterans in their community recognized their service and accepted them as members. Even though they really weren’t technically honorably discharged veterans, they were accepted as members.

Two of these men signed their enlistment papers. They were John Valentine and Joseph Ellmore, the two men who were born free. It’s not surprising the others didn’t because they were born enslaved and were still enslaved when the war began. Two of them never did learn to read or write, but the other three did learn to read and write later in life. And there are, again, there are men I talk about in the book who went to college, who began their Civil War service unable to write their own name, but got educated enough to have attended college to become teachers and other positions of responsibility.

All the men who were married were related to other soldiers by marriage, either their kids or they married the sister or the daughter or the widow of another veteran. So, there were serious permanent ties between these guys, unlike what was written in some of the history books I read initially.

Now, these are not the only six or seven interesting stories in the book. I think the most interesting ones are still in there. But these are good. How is it that these six were picked to be on the cover? Well, the artist who worked on the cover decided to put pictures of soldiers on the cover, and these guys had very high-quality photographs that we had of them. So, that was the reason. They all turned out to be interesting stories, but they had photographs because they stuck around. They stayed in Wisconsin. They managed, sometimes immediately or sometimes after a struggle, to establish themselves here and also to join the GAR, which is where four of those photographs are from, from the portrait sets that they made.

In that sense, they’re not typical. Most of the men who served from Wisconsin didn’t end up staying here, although, again, there are African American veterans of the Civil War buried in 31 counties in the state, which, again, is a reflection of where they lived when they were here. Most of the men who served with connections to Wisconsin, though, kept moving on, like Joseph Ellmore did, but he found his niche in Appleton. Many of them moved west, moved south, and many of them never got beyond being day laborers, living basically in poverty. It was a hard life. So, these guys were not typical in that way.

So, of all the nearly 700 men that I’ve documented, African Americans who served from Wisconsin, I found photographs of only 36 of them. There are probably more out there, but that’s all I found so far.

So, with that, I’ll leave off the open the floor for questions. Thank you for coming.

[audience applauding]