1st South Carolina Volunteers (Union)

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The First South Carolina Volunteers was a Union Army regiment during the American Civil War. It was composed of escaped slaves from South Carolina and Florida. There had been previous attempts to form black units in New Orleans and Kansas, but they were not officially recognized. The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment whose exploits are memorialized in the movie Glory was formed afterwards and drew from free Northern blacks.

Although it saw some combat, the regiment was not involved in any of the war's major battles. Its first commander was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He was - as were all the other officers - white. A proclamation by Jefferson Davis had indicated that members of the regiment would not be treated as prisoners of war if taken in battle. The enlisted men would be auctioned off as slaves and the white officers were to be hanged. The threat was not carried out officially.

The regiment was a step in the evolution of Union thinking towards the escaped slaves who crossed their lines. Initially they were returned to their owners. Next they were considered contrabands and used as laborers. Finally the legal fiction that they were property was abandoned and they were allowed to enlist in the Army, although in segregated units commanded by white officers. As a hangover from the "contraband" days, black privates were paid $10 per month, the rate for laborers, rather than the $13 paid to white privates.

Besides serving as the precedent for the over 170,000 "colored" troops that served in the Union Army the men have siginificance in cultural history. Their first commander, Thomas W. Higginson, a significant literary figure, was able to document the Gullah dialect spoken by the men and make a record of the spirituals that they sung, material that might otherwise not have been as well preserved.

[edit] Reference

• Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Army Life in a Black Regiment