and the First District Colored Volunteers Regiment.
General Benjamin Butler had organized the first black troops to see combat during the American Civil War in 1862, when he accepted the service of the Louisiana Native Guards. By January of 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was being formed and prepared for duties that would eventually lead its men south to Folly Beach and the assault on Fort Wagner outside Charleston, South Carolina. In the District of Columbia, black leaders such as John F. Cook, Anthony Bowen, and Reverend Henry Turner, had long advocated the creation of a black regiment drawn from the city's African-American population. By the summer of 1863, recruitment for the First District Colored Volunteer Regiment had gathered enough men to form two companies.
An estimated 180,000 African American soldiers and sailors fought to preserve the Union during the Civil War.
Afraid of the racial violence that armed and uniformed black soldiers might inspire from white Washingtonians and soldiers stationed in the District, government officials transferred the black recruits to Camp Greene on Analostan Island (now Theodore Roosevelt Island), on the Potomac River just south of Georgetown. So sensitive an issue was the presence of black troops being trained in the District of Columbia, it was said that not even President Lincoln knew the location of their camp. While the transfer did help to avoid any large-scale conflicts between uniformed blacks and white citizens, the harassment of individual black soldiers remained commonplace in Washington, D.C.
The men of the First District Volunteers rose at 5 a.m. and spent most of their day learning the routines of military drill. Formerly enslaved African Americans made up a large number of these recruits, many enlisted by recruiters moments after arriving in local Freedman's camps. Poet Walt Whitman, in Washington, D.C. to serve as a volunteer in Union Army hospitals, made passing reference to the men of the First District Volunteer Regiment when he wrote in June of 1863:
"There are getting to be many black troops: There is one very good regt. here black as tar; they go around, have the regular uniform - they submit to no nonsense… ."
The black recruits trained on Analostan until July of 1863, when they marched out of Camp Greene as the First Regiment United States Colored Troops (USCT) to board transports bound for Elizabeth City, North Carolina. There, the men of the First Regiment USCT engaged in fatigue work and routine patrols until December of 1863, when they joined Brigadier General Edward A. Wild's "African Brigade" (composed of three regiments of freed black men from North Carolina) on an expedition to South Mills, to disperse Confederate guerillas.
Historical accounts and archeological evidence support that, long before Europeans settled in the region, Analostan Island had been a home for American Indians. Europeans occupied the island by the late 1600s, and George Mason received title to the land in 1717, maintaining ownership until the 1830s. By the antebellum period, the island was home to a public garden, saloon, and commercial wharves. After a series of owners and tenants, the island was purchased by the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association in 1931 and given to the federal government, with the understanding that the property would be home to a Roosevelt memorial.
Source:
Gibbs, C.R, Black, Copper, and Bright: The District of Columbia's Black Civil War Regiment. Silver Spring, MD: Three Dimensional Publishing, 2002.
