Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On Feb. 14, 1865, while commanding the 32nd Colored Infantry during mop-up operations as part of Gen. William T. Sherman’s northern drive through South Carolina, Col. George Baird was wounded in fighting at James Island. Five days later, a Delaware native and formerly enslaved private named John Walter, of the 32nd’s Company K, shed blood in an explosion near Camden. Walter survived that event and received a $300 bounty when discharged in August, before disappearing from the public record.

But unlike many Union units that began to muster out of service soon after the fighting ended in April, units like the 32nd Colored Infantry and other regiments in the United States Colored Troops continued in service – many of them being shifted to the Mexican border. This wasn’t a coincidence: It was, instead, the result of a broader, globally inflected vision for black soldiers put forth by Union diplomats and policymakers during the war.

At the time, many European and South American armies employed black soldiers for service in hot and tropical climates, on the scientifically unfounded belief that they were biologically better suited for them. American diplomats tended to agree: As William Winthrop, the American consul to Malta, noted in an August 1862 report to Assistant Secretary of State Frederick W. Seward, “In hot climates, and for garrison duty, no better soldiers can be found than the blacks.” Winthrop also identified “Portugal, Turkey, and the Brazils” as having “now employed” black soldiers in their armies, and he speculated that “other nations … may hereafter … adopt a similar course of raising black battalions for the performance of particular duties.”

Winthrop’s observations were confirmed in January 1863 when William S. Thayer, the principle American diplomat to Egypt, notified Frederick Seward about a matter of “grave importance.” Citing information that` had “just come to light,” he shared that

On the morning of the 7th instant, four hundred and fifty black soldiers were, by order of the viceroy of Egypt, taken by railway from the barrage, (about 120 miles south of Alexandria) and at night shipped on board the French transport steamer Le Seine, for a destination generally understood to be Mexico, with the object of aiding the French Emperor in his military operations against that country. These negroes, with others, departed early yesterday morning. It is stated that they were dressed in zouave uniform and fully armed.

Noting the French rationale for employing African soldiers, Thayer added that Napoleon III “has been anxious to supply the losses which his Mexican Army has suffered from climate and disease by the employment of blacks.” More detail was added two weeks later when Lincoln’s chief representative to France, William Dayton, read a report in the French newspaper Monituer. Dayton added that the African soldiers had been “taken from Dalfour in Nubia … and … are destined to be placed in garrison at Vera Cruz.”10 Further, he reported that Britain was confident that its “negro companies from West India … sent to Vera Cruz” would do quite well.

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The Africans were in position in Mexico by April 1863. They primarily escorted supply trains from Vera Cruz to points across the forbidding Tierra de Caliente. One French officer described the soldiers as “tall Nubians, black as soot, dressed in white uniforms with tarbushes on their wooly skulls.” An American witness depicted them as “superb black giants draped in the folds of their white robes and bearing themselves with proud dignity.” According to the writer John Dunn, “many were ex-slaves, mostly Dinkas or Shilluks.”

A month later, the Union announced the creation of the Bureau of Colored Troops. Under this authority more than 130 United States Colored Troop regiments were recruited. And while it is unclear how central reports like Thayer’s were to Lincoln’s thinking, there can be little doubt that he and his advisers were aware of them.

State and local public figures promoted the regiments’ value as a bulwark against foreign aggression. Saluting the assembled ranks of the Third Infantry Regiment at Pennsylvania’s Camp William Penn in late July 1863, the abolitionist lawyer George H. Earle urged the troops forth with a dual objective: “Our country now calls upon the colored men to defend the flag… [and] you are organizing that you may say to foreign States, who would interfere in our affairs, ‘Stand back!’ and to the rebel hordes, ‘Disperse!’”

Following Earle’s speech, the assemblage heard a similar globalist theme when Pennsylvania Congressman William D. Kelley noted that “the courage of the black man is to [liberate the South] and also to warn any European government that would interfere in our affairs that we will overrun it with black soldiers if need be.”

On Aug. 25, 1863, Winthrop reiterated his concern that the deployment of black soldiers in the broader Atlantic World threatened the United States. Recalling his earlier warning, he pointed out that “England has increased the colored strength of her maintaining army, as I mentioned would be done in my communication … written more than twelve months ago.” Now, identifying the West Indian regiments as an imperial threat across the wider Atlantic, Winthrop wrote: “Not only has Great Britain increased the numbers of her black regiments, but has them at this very time employed in active warfare against the king of Ashantee.”

Arguing that the black units of foreign armies had to be met by similar forces under an American flag, Winthrop went on,

England is increasing her black force…why may we not, when our Affairs are so unsettled with this power; have the powerful arm of Defence [sic], in case she should employ it on our coast, or we are obliged to meet it on the plains of Canada? And … France … why should we not have our colored regiments to meet her black Zouaves … we should have … a colored army … to … enable us to expel the French from Mexico whenever we make the attempt and at the same time to meet the black regiments of England, whenever, and wherever they might be thrown in our way.

This great grandson of John Winthrop, the famous Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, envisioned United States Colored Troop regiments remaining an essential defense unit in post-bellum America. “I look upon a colored army as absolutely necessary for the preservation of the whole country.”

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That idea shaped the redeployment of United States Colored Troop regiments as the Civil War entered its terminal phase. Agreeably, Union Gen. Joe Hooker also “predicted that after the rebellion was subdued, it would be necessary for the United States to send an army into Mexico. This army would be composed largely of colored men.” Starting in late 1864, more than 30 United States Colored Troop regiments were reorganized into the 25th Army Corps and shipped to south Texas, for patrol along the Rio Grande.

From that remote location, the regiments could not defend freedmen east of the Mississippi who were struggling against a rising southern backlash to Reconstruction. Even the enslaved Texans at Galveston who learned on June 19 about emancipation – birthing the Juneteenth celebration – were beyond their reach. If needed, however, the troops were available to fight Native Americans as well as foreign armies.

By September 1866, the United States Colored Troop regiments had been mustered out of service, and the veterans had returned home to eke out meager livings on farms or in urban centers. Some joined local struggles for citizenship rights and established self-defense militias to protect against racist mob violence. Meanwhile, the Sudanese Battalion returned home from Mexico in 1867. Traveling via Paris, its members were awarded military honors by Emperor Louis Napoleon.

France would be the first nation to decorate a black regiment of the United States. In November 1918 the famed 369th Infantry Regiment, a k a the “Harlem Hellfighters,” received the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star for capturing the village of Séchault during World War I. By this time, however, a plethora of veteran inspired anticolonial movements across the African diaspora could draw upon the martial legacy of the black regiments of the Civil War era.

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Sources: Thomas W. Wilson and Clarence E. Grim, “The Possible Relationship between the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Hypertension in Blacks Today,” in “The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe,” eds. Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman; Howard Dean B. Mahin, “One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War”; Howard Jones, “Union In Peril: The Crisis Over British Intervention in the Civil War”; Brian Dyde, “The Empty Sleeve, The Story of the West Indian Regiments of the British Army”; Richard Hill and Peter Hogg, “A Black Corps d’Élite: An Egyptian Sudanese Conscript Battalion with the French Army in Mexico, 1863-1867, and its survivors in Subsequent African History”; John P. Dunn, “Khedive Ismail’s Army”; Bernard C. Nalty, “Strength For the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military”; Joseph T. Wilson, “The Black Phalanx: African American Soldiers in the War of Independence, the War of 1812, and the Civil War”; William Winthrop to William Seward, Aug. 25, 1863, in “The Negro in the Military Service of the United States: 1639-1886,” National Archives and Records Administration; William Thayer to William Seward, Jan. 9, 1963, National Archives and Records Administration; William Dayton to William Seward, Jan. 23, 1863, National Archives and Records Administration.

James E. Johnson, an independent scholar, is completing a book on African-Americans of the upper mid-Atlantic coast in the Civil War.