“We captured three Negro soldiers, the first we had seen,” Private Byrd Willis wrote on May 8, 1864. “They were taken out on the road side and shot and their bodies left there.” Coming across these lines a century and a half later was “a chilling experience,” Lambert said in a phone interview. “It was like a common occurrence. No ceremony, just, ‘Oh, we lined ’em up and shot ’em.’ ” On Saturday, the three unknown soldiers of the U.S. Colored Troops will be honored in Culpeper County, Va., not far from where they were executed.
The Confederacy did not recognize U.S. Colored Troops as soldiers but as enslaved people in a state of insurrection, and as such it did not follow the prisoner-of-war rules it used for White Union troops. Instead, captured Black soldiers were either sold into slavery or, like the anonymous men on May 8, 1864, summarily executed. Read more HERE.