The 28th USCT in Their Own Words: A Correction

On April 4, 1865, two days after Confederate forces abandoned Richmond, Union troops walked into the city. Among the first units in were Black regiments of the Army of the James, including the 28th United States Colored Troops — Indiana’s regiment of Black soldiers, organized at Camp Fremont in Indianapolis in the winter of 1863–64. At the head of the column, on foot, was the regiment’s chaplain, the Reverend Garland H. White.

White was thirty-five years old. He had been born into slavery in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1829. As a boy of about twelve he had been sold from his mother to Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia. He had escaped to London, Ontario in 1858, become a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and recruited Black volunteers in Ohio and Indiana for the 54th Massachusetts and then the 28th USCT. By April 1865 he was the appointed Chaplain of the regiment — with the rank equivalent of Captain, the officer’s uniform finally granted — and he was walking through the streets of the city the Confederacy had defended for four years.

In the crowd, somewhere along the line of march, a woman who had not seen him in more than twenty years saw her son. They met in the street. White wrote about it for The Christian Recorder, the AME Church’s national newspaper, in a letter published April 22, 1865.

This post is about that letter. And about the letters White wrote before and after it — from the field, from the Crater, from Texas. And about four men named Trail, from Henry County, Indiana, whose service and whose dying are preserved in correspondence at a small museum library in Tennessee. And about why the fourth entry in this series was not wrong to call the third voice a silence, but was wrong to leave that framing there.

The correction

The fourth entry in this Union-history series — Two Diaries and a Silence: Three Hoosier Voices from the Union War — sat down with three Hoosiers: Theodore F. Upson of the 100th Indiana, First Sergeant William Bluffton Miller of the 75th Indiana, and the 28th USCT. The first two had left bound books that the publishing tradition carried into university-press editions. The third, the post said, had left an institutional voice — descriptive book, casualty rolls, the Adjutant General’s report — but not, in the canonical archive, an individual voice. The post called this a silence, named it as part of the war’s record, and refused to invent voices the archive had not kept.

That framing was honest. It was also incomplete.

The 28th USCT was not silent. It published in the Black wartime press. Chaplain Garland White wrote letter after letter to The Christian Recorder of Philadelphia, the AME Church’s national newspaper, throughout 1864 and 1865 — the Crater on August 20, 1864; the march into Richmond on April 22, 1865; the occupation duty in Texas on October 21, 1865; the regiment’s service summed up on September 19, 1865. The letters are documented, dated, and quotable. They are collected, where the canonical Civil War archive is searched: in Edwin S. Redkey’s A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army 1861–1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), the standard scholarly compilation of USCT correspondence. They sit on the same library shelves as Upson’s and Miller’s diaries. They were always there. The first reading of this series missed them.

There is a name for this kind of correction. The Black studies scholar Saidiya Hartman, writing about much harder archival silences — the lives of enslaved women whose names survive only as fragments in slave-ship manifests — has argued that the dominant archive is not the only archive, and that the work of telling history honestly includes naming the gaps in one’s own reading. This post is that work, applied here. The voices were always there. This series missed them on its first pass. Part Five corrects the record.

Chaplain Garland H. White

Garland H. White was born in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1829. The bare data of his life is preserved in his federal pension file, in the records of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and in the regimental records of the 28th USCT. The story those documents tell is its own kind of American biography.

As a child he belonged to Robert Toombs of Georgia — sold to Toombs from his mother around the time he was twelve. Toombs was a planter, a slaveholder, and from 1853 to 1861 a United States Senator from Georgia, who would later serve briefly as the Confederate States’ first Secretary of State. White, as Toombs’s personal servant, traveled with Toombs to Washington during the late 1850s — the years in which Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner unconscious on the Senate floor over an antislavery speech, in which the country broke apart in installments. White was in the capital during that period. He was a young Black man in his twenties watching the United States Senate function under slavery. He left the country shortly afterward.

In 1858 White escaped. He reached London, Ontario — Canada West — and joined the AME Church. He was ordained an AME minister in 1859. He had a wife. He had work. He had freedom.

When the war began, he came back. He offered his services to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton as a recruiter for Black troops. He worked first in Ohio, recruiting for the 54th Massachusetts in 1863, then came to Indianapolis at the end of that year to help raise what would become the 28th USCT. Governor Oliver P. Morton and the antislavery community there — including Calvin Fletcher, on whose land Camp Fremont was built, and the Reverend Willis Revels, who served as recruiting officer and assistant surgeon — relied on him.

He could not, by federal policy, be commissioned as a chaplain right away. The Army of the United States had no Black chaplains in 1863, and would have very few during the war. White enlisted in the 28th as a private, and quietly served as the regiment’s chaplain anyway through the winter of 1863–64. He wrote to Stanton. The officers of the regiment elected him. After months of pressing, on October 25, 1864 — by then he was thirty-five — Secretary Stanton appointed him Chaplain of the 28th United States Colored Troops, with the rank equivalent of Captain. He was not granted an officer’s uniform at first, the Army’s reasoning being that white soldiers would have to salute him. The uniform came in 1865.

Through this whole arc he was writing. His letters to The Christian Recorder are the regiment’s working voice. They are dated. They are reproduced in Redkey’s collection and quoted at length in Edward Miller’s 1997 article in Civil War History. They are not contested.

On the Battle of the Crater — July 30, 1864, at Petersburg, where the 4th Division of the Ninth Corps, the Black division of the Army of the Potomac, was committed only after the white assault had collapsed in the crater the mine had opened — White wrote on August 20, 1864:

the colored troops went as far as they were ordered to go, and did just what they were told to do… the brave officers who led them in, when they saw that bad management had taken place somewhere… ordered retreat.

The white press of 1864 was assigning blame to the USCT regiments for the disaster. White’s letter is the regimental chaplain’s defense of the men he had ministered to and buried. It is a primary source for what the men of the 28th and the other USCT regiments believed about what had happened at the Crater, and who they thought was responsible.

On the entry into Richmond, April 4, 1865, in his letter to The Christian Recorder published April 22:

after which the doors of all of the slave pens were thrown open and thousands came out shouting and praising God and father or master Abe, as they termed him… we made a great parade through most of the principal streets of the city… the excitement at this period was unabated…

And in the same letter, on whose troops were first into the city:

Some people do not seem to believe that the colored troops were the first that entered Richmond. Why, you need not feel at all timid in giving the truthfulness of my assertion to the four winds of the heavens, and let the angels re-echo it back to the earth, that the colored soldiers of the Army of the James were the first to enter the city of Richmond. I was with them, and am still with them, and am willing to stay with them until freedom is proclaimed throughout the world.

It was during the march through Richmond that he found his mother. He had not seen her since he was sold from her, more than twenty years earlier. The meeting is recorded in the historical accounts of the regiment and in White’s own letter. He did not flourish it. He recorded it. He kept marching.

On occupation duty in Texas, in the letter of October 21, 1865:

going to the grave with the dead is as common as going to bed for me.

And on the political situation on the ground in Texas in the same month:

the rebels are still holding their slaves, and treating them more cruelly than ever.

And on the meaning of the 28th’s service, in his letter of September 19, 1865:

we left our wives and little ones to follow the stars and stripes from the Lakes to the Gulf, with a determination never to turn back until it should be proclaimed from Washington that the flag of the Union waved over a nation of freemen.

When the 28th was mustered out and welcomed home with a public banquet and parade in Indianapolis on January 8, 1866, White was the regiment’s final speaker. The Indianapolis Daily Journal reported the speech the following day. He described what the regiment had done as “a large nail in the great platform of equal justice.”

These are not invented sentences. These are the words a Hoosier soldier wrote about the war he fought. They were in print before the men of the 28th had finished mustering out. They had been there the whole time.

The Trail Brothers of Henry County

If Chaplain White’s voice carries the 28th USCT at the regimental level, the Trail family of Henry County, Indiana carries it at the family level. Four brothers — Benjamin, James, William Jr., David — served. Three of the four served in the 28th itself; one was attached to the 14th USCT. Two of the four did not come home.

Their father, William Trail Sr., had escaped slavery in Maryland in 1814 and reached Indiana Territory while it was still a territory — the year before statehood. The Trail family settled in Henry County, in a part of central Indiana that grew into one of the state’s quietly important antislavery communities, with strong Quaker and free-Black ties. The brothers grew up there. They were free-born. They went to school. Benjamin became a teacher. When the federal government finally authorized Black enlistment, they enlisted.

Sgt. Maj. Benjamin F. Trail

Benjamin F. Trail was born in 1840. He had been a schoolteacher in Henry County before the war. He enlisted in the 28th USCT early in its organization. Because of his literacy and his education, he was made the regimental sergeant major — the highest noncommissioned rank in the regiment, and the highest rank a Black soldier in the 28th could hold. As regimental sergeant major he was responsible for the regiment’s record-keeping — the morning reports, the muster rolls, the descriptive books. The institutional voice this series cited from Post Four onward, in the case of the 28th, ran in part through Benjamin Trail’s hand. He was killed at the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864. He was twenty-four years old.

James Trail

James Trail was born in 1828, the oldest of the four. He served with the 28th and survived the Crater and the Petersburg lines and the entry into Richmond. He went with the regiment to Texas after Appomattox, as part of the federal occupation force during Reconstruction. He died of scurvy in Corpus Christi, Texas, on September 24, 1865 — five weeks before the 28th was officially mustered out, and three months before the regiment’s welcome-home parade in Indianapolis. He was thirty-seven.

William Trail Jr.

William Trail Jr. was born in 1830. He enlisted later than his brothers — mustering into the 28th in February 1865, after the regiment was already on the lines at Petersburg. He served the last months of the war and the occupation duty, was mustered out with the regiment, and came home. He lived in Henry County for almost half a century more, dying in 1914 at the age of eighty-four.

David Trail

David Trail was born in 1838. He served not with the 28th but with the 14th USCT, a regiment raised in Tennessee that fought in the western theater. He survived the war, mustered out in 1865, and died young, in 1869.

The family papers

The Trail brothers’ correspondence — letters home from camp, letters between brothers, letters from the lines at Petersburg — is preserved at the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, under collection numbers 80.2411.1 through 80.2411.11. A separate William Trail letter is held by the Indiana Historical Society, SC2883. The Indiana Historical Bureau has published an essay on the family by Wilma L. Moore, senior archivist for African American history at the Indiana Historical Society, drawing on these materials.

These are not famous names. They are not Lew Wallace; they are not Robert Gould Shaw. They are a free-Black Indiana family that gave four sons to the Union cause, lost two of them, and preserved their letters in a way the archive of the dominant American story did not. The letters survived because the family kept them. They reached an archive because a small university library in Tennessee, founded after the war by a Union general to serve mountain communities, took them in. They are dated, verifiable, and quotable. They were not in the canonical Civil War diary tradition because the canonical Civil War diary tradition was not built to carry them.

This is what Hartman meant by archival silence: not the absence of voice, but the absence of voice from the place we are accustomed to looking.

What Part One got right, what Part One got wrong

Part One was right about the institutional voice. The 28th USCT’s regimental descriptive book at the National Archives, in Record Group 94, lists every man who served — name, age, complexion, height, eye color, place of birth, occupation, company, dates of muster and discharge or death. William H. H. Terrell’s 1865–69 Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana includes the regiment across its eight volumes. The casualty rolls from the Crater carry Benjamin Trail’s name and rank. The Compiled Service Records held at NARA include every soldier the regiment enrolled. None of that has changed. The institutional voice the post called for is real, and it remains load-bearing here. Two of the four Trail brothers are in those records as the dead. Garland White is in those records as the chaplain.

Part One was wrong to call the rest a silence.

The rest is a body of letters in the Black wartime press — The Christian Recorder, the Anglo-African, the AME Church papers that the dominant Civil War publishing tradition catalogued separately and read separately, when it read them at all. The rest is a folder of correspondence at a small museum library in a Tennessee mountain town. The rest is a William Trail letter at IHS, an essay on the family by Wilma Moore at IHB, a dissertation by William Forstchen at Purdue, an article on Garland White by Edward Miller in Civil War History, and Edwin Redkey’s standard compilation of USCT correspondence at Cambridge University Press. The rest was always there. This series — and this writer — needed to look more carefully.

Part Five is the part where this series goes where the voices are.

The dead earn the page; the living do too

These men are not a footnote to the 28th USCT’s institutional record. They are its record.

The 28th USCT raised at Camp Fremont in the winter of 1863–64. Took the field in the spring of 1864. Was committed at the Crater. Lost Benjamin Trail and many others. Marched into Richmond on April 4, 1865, with Garland White at the head of the column. Went to Texas. Lost James Trail to scurvy in Corpus Christi. Mustered out in November 1865. Came home to Indianapolis on January 8, 1866. Was welcomed with a banquet and a parade.

Garland White was the regiment’s final speaker that day. The Indianapolis Daily Journal reported what he said. He called the 28th’s service “a large nail in the great platform of equal justice.” The phrase has not entered the standard Civil War quotation books. It belongs there.

The dead of the 28th earn the page. So do the living who came home — Garland White, William Trail Jr., the men who walked back into Camp Fremont’s old grounds and went home to Henry County, to Indianapolis, to wherever in Indiana they had come from. So do the words they wrote, and the letters their families kept, and the small archives that took the letters in when the large ones did not.

Honest history goes where the voices are. This series will try to keep doing that.

Sources

• Garland H. White, letters to The Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, AME Church): August 20, 1864; April 22, 1865; September 19, 1865; October 21, 1865. As reproduced in scholarly compilation below.
• Edwin S. Redkey, A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). The standard scholarly collection of USCT correspondence, including Garland White’s letters from the field.
• Edward A. Miller, Jr., “Garland H. White, Black Army Chaplain,” Civil War History 43, no. 3 (September 1997): 201–218.
• George P. Clark and Mary E. Clark, “Heroes Carved in Ebony: Indiana’s Black Civil War Regiment, the 28th USCT,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 7, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 4–16.
• William R. Forstchen, The 28th United States Colored Troops: Indiana’s African Americans Go to War, 1863–1865 (Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University, 1994).
• Wilma L. Moore, “The Trail Brothers and Their Civil War Service in the 28th USCT,” Indiana Historical Bureau, “Hoosier Voices Now” series, in.gov/history (accessed 2026-05-16).
• Trail Brothers Correspondence, Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum at Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tennessee, collections 80.2411.1 through 80.2411.11.
• William Trail letter, SC2883, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis.
• William H. H. Terrell, Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana, 8 vols. (Indianapolis: W. R. Holloway, State Printer, 1865–1869). The canonical primary record for the 28th USCT and every other Indiana regiment.
• Indianapolis Daily Journal, January 9, 1866 — reporting on the 28th USCT’s welcome-home banquet and parade of January 8, including Chaplain White’s “large nail in the great platform of equal justice” speech.
• National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 94 — Regimental Descriptive Books and Compiled Service Records of the 28th USCT.
• U.S. War Department, General Order No. 143, May 22, 1863 (establishing the Bureau of Colored Troops).
• U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. XL — reports on the Battle of the Crater, July 30, 1864.
• Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14 — the methodological reference for reading archival silences as part of the record.
• National Park Service, “The Civil War — United States Colored Troops” reference resources, nps.gov/civilwar (accessed 2026-05-16).