Gallery: African Americans in the War
Island Mound Article
This article appeared in Harper’s Weekly on March 14, 1863, and was titled “Negroes as Soldiers”; the article contains extracts from a letter to the New York Times, describing the skirmish at Island Mound, Bates County, Missouri, between a detachment of the First Kansas Colored Volunteers and a band of rebels on October 27-29, 1862. Being untested, the African-Americans’ fighting qualities were being questioned throughout the North. This skirmish is the first known engagement involving African-Americans in the Civil War, which resulted in a complete victory for the 1st Kansas.
The unknown letter writer describes how the mounted rebels swept down like a whirlwind upon the First Kansas, who fired a volley in concert that emptied several saddles. “The fight thus became a hand to hand encounter of one man to six,” the Harper’s article noted, and continued with a graphic description of the fighting:
“Six-Killer, the leader of the Cherokee negroes, fell with six wounds after shooting two men, bayoneting a third, and laying a fourth hors du combat with the butt of his gun. Another one, badly wounded, Sergeant Ed. Lowrey, was attacked by three men; he had discharged his rifle, and had no time to load again, when they fell upon him with revolver and sabre. He was then badly hurt with a shot-gun wound. One man demanded his surrender, to which the reply was a stunning blow from the butt of the rifle, knocking him off his horse. The negro, when approached, had his sabre-bayonet in hand, about to fix it on his gun. The prostrate man got a crashing blow from it on the skull as he fell, and then, as the other charged, the bayonet was used with effect on the nearest horse, and the butt of the gun on the next man.”
The author noted, “What I narrate I saw myself, and having witnessed several engagements since this rebellion commenced, I know what fighting amounts to.”
Image Courtesy Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield Library Collection
