From Gettysburg to the Battle of the Crater

Black History Month

Library of Congress Photo

Even before the deployment of US Colored Troops in 1863, African Americans were involved in Civil War battles as personal servants, cooks, and laborers.

William Wilson accompanied Spencer Glasgow Welch, CSA Assistant Surgeon, 13th South Carolina, as his enslaved servant. On the march to Pennsylvania in June 1863, Welch wrote that, “My servant , Wilson, says he ‘don’t like Pennsylvania at all,’ because he ‘sees no black folks’. But after the battle, he reported that “My servant got lost in Maryland. I do not think it was his intention to leave, but he was negligent about keeping up and got in rear of the army and found it too late to cross the river.” (1)

A year later in August 1864, Welch wrote home that a negro, captured at Petersburg on July 30 at the Battle of the Crater, claimed to have belonged to a medical officer of McGowan’s Brigade and was registered as William Wilson of New York. Welch believed it might be his servant Wilson who claimed his name was William Wilson. “If so, the remarkable part of it is that he was captured charging our breastworks. If I get him, I shall regard him as something of a curiosity in the future.” Welch apparently did not pursue the connection, but a prisoner of war record and casualty sheet for W. Wilson Company C, 28th USCT shows that he died November 19, 1864, at Danville Prison, Virginia, of chronic diarrhea.

(1) Spencer Glasgow Welch, A Confederate Surgeon’s Letters to his Wife, New York and Washington, The Neale Publishing company, 1911. P. 58, 60, 104.