President Obama signs a declaration to declare Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, as a national monument on November 1, 2011.
2011 marks the beginning of the sesquicentennial of the war that pitted brother against brother. Over the next four years in museums and university lecture halls, at conferences, and on battlefields across America the Sesquicentennial of War Between the States will be commemorated.
The role of African Americans in the Civil War is not going unnoticed. The 2011 National Black History Month theme was “African Americans and the Civil War.” This was also the focus of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s (ASALH) 85th Annual Black History Luncheon. (The ASALH was started by Carter G. Woodson, the Father of Black History.) In July the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum held its Grand Opening and is hosting a curator lecture series throughout the year. The U. S. National Library of Medicine put together a six-banner traveling exhibition titled “Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African Americans in Civil War Medicine” that explores the African American men and women who served as surgeons and nurses during the American Civil War. The Contraband Historical Society called their two day sesquicentennial celebration “Escape for Freedom: From Slave to Contraband.” The two day event at Fort Monroe, where Union Major General Benjamin Butler decided that escaped slaves were “contraband of war”, featured a conference, parade, and re-enactors.
It was in October of 1862 that a young enslaved Allen Allensworth threw on an old tattered Union Army jacket, put a small campfire pot on his head, covered his face in mud then marched down Main Street with the soldiers of the Forty-fourth Illinois; thus becoming “contraband of war.” Allensworth would spend his first days of freedom as a nurse with the Forty-fourth Illinois.
On April 3, 1863 Allensworth enlisted in the Navy, becoming one of over 20,000 African Americans who served in the Union Navy. Unlike the African Americans that served in special units in the Union Army, these brave men serviced side by side on the same vessels as white sailors.
On November 4, 1864 Allensworth was serving as the captain’s steward on the gunboat Tawah as it patrolled up and down the Tennessee River protecting the Union Army supply depot at Johnsonville, Tennessee when Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s artillery forces opened fire. After several hours of fighting the Tawah, Key West and Elfin gunboats were all badly damaged. Rather than letting the gunboats fall into Confederate hands the crews set the gunboats on fire.
Severe winds caused the fire to jump to supplies stored on the riverbank then to a supply depot warehouse. Confederate artillery forces began firing on the supply depot, causing the Union soldiers to take cover rather than fight the fires.
After two years of service Allensworth was honorably discharged from the Navy as a Petty Officer First Class.
On December 30, 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned Allensworth as a Major; one of the first two Army chaplains to be promoted to the rank of Major. In 1882 Congress passed a law that permitted veterans of the Civil War to be promoted one rank on retirement from the Army. As a result Chaplain Allensworth was placed on the retired list of the Army with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, at the time the highest rank obtained by an African American.
Stephen Hill, Sr.
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