A Brave Black Regiment: The 54th Massachusetts and the Birth of the USCT

On the evening of July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry went up a narrow strip of beach toward Battery Wagner, a Confederate earthwork guarding the approach to Charleston Harbor. The regiment led the assault. Within about an hour it had lost something close to half the men who made the charge.

Sergeant William Harvey Carney of Company C was not the color bearer. When the soldier carrying the national flag was shot down on the slope of the fort, Carney took the colors, carried them forward to the parapet, and — when the assault collapsed — carried them back, crawling much of the way, shot in the chest, the legs, and the arm. He would not let the flag touch the ground. When he reached the Union line, he was reported to have said only that he had done his duty, and that the old flag had never touched the ground.

That sentence is on the record. So is the Medal of Honor that eventually recognized the act — though it did not reach Carney until 1900, thirty-seven years later. His action at Battery Wagner is the earliest for which any Black American holds the Medal of Honor.

The 54th Massachusetts did not take Battery Wagner. The fort held. But the regiment had not really been sent there to take a fort. It had been sent to answer a question the United States had spent two years refusing to ask out loud: whether Black men would fight for the Union, and whether the Union would let them. This is the story of the regiment that answered it — and of the nearly 180,000 men who followed through the door it opened.

Authorized at last

The Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect January 1, 1863, did two things. It declared enslaved people in the rebelling states free, and — in a clause that drew less attention at the time — it authorized their enlistment into the armed forces of the United States. That second clause is what made the 54th Massachusetts possible.

Within weeks, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, a committed abolitionist, secured War Department authorization to raise a Black infantry regiment. He wanted it to be unimpeachable — the regiment that opponents of Black enlistment would have to argue against on the merits, not on the excuses. Andrew handpicked the officers from abolitionist families and gave command to 25-year-old Robert Gould Shaw, son of prominent Boston abolitionists.

Massachusetts did not have a large Black population, so the regiment was recruited nationally. A recruiting network reached across the free states, into the border states, and as far as Canada. Frederick Douglass worked as a recruiter and published the call — "Men of Color, To Arms!" — and his own sons enlisted: Lewis Douglass became the regiment's sergeant major, and Charles Douglass served in its ranks. The men who filled the 54th were free Black Northerners, formerly enslaved men who had reached free soil, tradesmen, farmers, sailors, and laborers. They mustered through the spring of 1863, and on May 28 the regiment marched through Boston to the wharves, past cheering abolitionist crowds and silent skeptical ones, and shipped south.

Enlistment was not a small decision for these men. A Black soldier captured by Confederate forces faced re-enslavement or execution, not the prisoner exchange a white soldier could expect. The men of the 54th knew it when they signed their names. They enlisted anyway, into a regiment the country was openly watching to see whether it would hold.

Battery Wagner

The 54th's first action was a sharp skirmish on James Island, South Carolina, on July 16, 1863, where the regiment held under fire and covered the withdrawal of white troops. Two days later it was chosen to lead the assault on Battery Wagner.

The tactical situation was bad, and the regiment's officers knew it. Wagner was a powerful earthwork; the approach was a narrow strip of beach the defenders had ranged precisely; the assault was going in at dusk after the regiment had spent two days with little food and no rest. Shaw led the charge on foot. The 54th reached the parapet and held a section of it in hand-to-hand fighting before the larger assault failed and the supporting brigades fell back.

The cost was severe. Of roughly 600 men of the 54th in the assault, the regiment lost on the order of 270 — killed, wounded, captured, or missing — in a single evening. Shaw was killed on the parapet and buried by the Confederates in a mass grave with his soldiers. The burial was meant as a dishonor. Shaw's family asked that his body be left where it was, with his men.

Battery Wagner did not fall that night, or to that assault. The fort held until September, when the Confederates abandoned it under siege — but by then the assault had already done the work that mattered, which had never really been about the fort. The Northern press carried the story of the 54th's conduct under fire, and the argument that Black soldiers would not stand in a hard fight did not survive it. The regiment had been sent to make a case, and at a price of nearly half its strength in an hour, it made it.

Seven dollars

Then the United States tried to pay them less.

Under the Militia Act of 1862, Black soldiers were paid $10 a month, with $3 deducted for clothing — a net of $7. White soldiers of the same rank received $13 a month plus a clothing allowance. The 54th Massachusetts had enlisted under the understanding of equal pay. When the pay tables came through unequal, the regiment refused to be paid at all.

It held that line for roughly eighteen months. The men of the 54th — and of its sister regiment, the 55th Massachusetts — served, marched, and fought while drawing no wages, rather than accept a discriminatory rate. When the State of Massachusetts offered to make up the difference out of its own treasury, the regiments refused that too. The point was not the money. The point was that the federal government should pay them as soldiers of the United States, because that is what they were.

The protest was not without cost. Sergeant William Walker of the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry led his company to stack arms over the pay inequity; he was court-martialed for mutiny and executed. Congress finally equalized the pay of Black soldiers in mid-1864 and made the change retroactive. The 54th accepted its back pay that fall — more than a year and a half after it had earned the first of it.

The scale behind the regiment

The 54th Massachusetts is the regiment people remember. It was the leading edge of something much larger.

On May 22, 1863, the War Department issued General Order No. 143, establishing the Bureau of Colored Troops to organize what became the United States Colored Troops. By the end of the war, roughly 175 USCT regiments had been raised. About 179,000 Black men served in the Union Army — close to one in ten Union soldiers — and roughly 19,000 more served in the Union Navy, which had never formally excluded them.

They were not held back from the hard fighting. USCT regiments fought at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend in 1863, at the Crater outside Petersburg and at Nashville in 1864, and at New Market Heights, Virginia, where fourteen Black soldiers earned the Medal of Honor in a single day's assault. In all, about twenty-five Black soldiers and sailors received the Medal of Honor for Civil War service.

By the last year of the war, that manpower had become decisive, and Abraham Lincoln said so plainly. In his public letters he argued that the United States could not have carried the war to victory without its Black soldiers and sailors, and he warned against any peace that would return them to bondage after they had fought for the Union. The 54th Massachusetts had been raised to answer whether Black men would fight. The answer had become one the President was building his war policy on.

And they died in the numbers every Civil War army died in. Roughly 36,000 to 40,000 USCT soldiers did not survive the war — the majority, as in every Union state's regiments, of disease rather than enemy fire. They also carried a danger white Union soldiers did not. Confederate policy and practice toward captured Black soldiers ranged from re-enslavement to outright massacre, as at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864. The USCT soldier shouldered the ordinary risks of the war and an extraordinary one stacked on top of them.

What the door opened

The men of the 54th Massachusetts who died at Battery Wagner lie where the war put them — like the Hoosiers, like every other Union soldier this series will count. Some are in Beaufort National Cemetery in South Carolina. Many have no marked grave at all. Robert Gould Shaw is still in the ground on Morris Island, where his family asked him to stay.

This is the second entry in a standing series on the citizen-soldier Union. The first counted Indiana's regiments and named the 28th USCT — the one Black regiment Indiana raised — almost in passing. This entry is the rest of that sentence. The United States Colored Troops were not a footnote to the Union Army. They were close to a tenth of it, and the door they came through was opened by a regiment sent to a fort it could not take, precisely so that no one could say afterward it had not been asked.

The dead earn the page. The 54th earned it at Battery Wagner — and then waited eighteen months to be paid for the privilege.

Sources

• Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865 (Boston: Boston Book Company, 1894). Emilio was a captain in the regiment; the canonical primary unit history.
• Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (1956; University Press of Kansas reprint, 1987). The standard scholarly history of the USCT.
• Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865 (Little, Brown, 1998).
• 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. XXVIII — reports on the assault on Battery Wagner. (Cited as “OR.”)
• Medal of Honor citation, Sergeant William H. Carney, 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (action July 18, 1863; medal issued May 23, 1900).
• National Park Service, “The Civil War — United States Colored Troops” reference resources, nps.gov/civilwar (accessed 2026-05-13).
• Massachusetts Historical Society, Robert Gould Shaw papers and 54th Regiment records (accessed 2026-05-13).