Black Civil War Prisoners of War: History, Research, and Resources

By Caroline Wood Newhall. Updated October 26, 2026.

From 1862 to 1865, the Confederate military and private citizens enslaved Black soldiers, also known as the United States Colored Troops (USCT), by various means rather than treating them as legitimate combatants. Confederates saw the United States’ Black soldiers as slaves, treating Black POWs as reclaimed property and as a labor corps subject to the demands of military necessity under the laws of war. Black POWs were therefore relatively mobile and usually labored outside of prison walls, beyond the sight of US officials and White POWs. Black POWs could be (and were) sold, reclaimed by former enslavers, and used as laborers on military works, in hospitals, and in prisons. Black POWs’ carceral experiences therefore centered upon their labor rather than their close confinement. Black POWs navigated their captivity using survival strategies employed by enslaved African Americans over several generations, such as building personal relationships with one another and sympathetic whites, using their particular skills while forced to labor, and escape. Their first person testimony, found in hundreds of military pensions, is vital to making sense of their survival and direct action during the war.

The Problem of Numbers

The precise number of Black U.S. soldiers who became POWs in Confederate-held territory will never be known. As Stephen Berry has noted, it is important to understand that data in the humanities “is almost never like scientific data, which is to say highly controlled and created in a laboratory under ideal conditions.” Indeed, numbers taken from incomplete historical sources—particularly in the midst of war (and the resulting destruction that war ushers in)—is, Berry states, “highly contextualized, limited by the ends and means…of the people who created it.” In the context of the American Civil War, wherein the warring factions were led by biased people who placed great importance on certain areas of information and little importance on others, locating Black soldiers who disappeared from the sight of white U.S. soldiers, officers, and other officials is a laborious endeavor. Confederates rarely kept consistent records on the Black soldiers who fell into their hands, and many scholars have worked to reconstruct elements of Black POWs’ experiences using incomplete data that intentionally obscured the scale of Black soldiers’ captivity and enslavement. In most estimates, between 800-1,200 Black soldiers were believed to have survived their initial encounters with Confederates to become POWs. [1] 

In fact, many more Black soldiers fell into the hands of the Confederates and survived to talk about it than perhaps their contemporaries and certainly later historians realized. As many as 2,200 members of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) were taken prisoner and approximately 70% of those men are known to have survived. [2] It is also quite possible there are more Black POWs to be found, particularly as researchers apply massive data collection methods such as larger-scale text analysis to investigate diverse sources across discrete archival holdings in various institutions, existing databases, digital humanities projects, and published works. [3]

The preservation of U.S. Army service and military pension records has made it possible to reconstruct elements of Black POWs’ experiences and to do so from their own firsthand testimonies. First, U.S. Army service records often contain memoranda about a soldier’s term of service including hospital stays, loss of equipment, courts martial, going AWOL, deaths in service, and terms of captivity. By researching Black regiments that saw action (as opposed to the many Black regiments that did not), it is possible to collect data on men confirmed to have been POWs or suspected of becoming POWs. Across more than 50 USCT regiments, then, around 2,200 men have been positively identified as POWs, with more to be discovered. 

Most significant, however, is the prevalence of Black POWs’ own perspectives in the historical record. The survivors of Confederate captivity did not simply fade into obscurity, ignored and overlooked by white chroniclers. Along with four Black POWs who testified at the military tribunal for Confederate Captain Henry Wirz in the fall of 1865 as to their experiences under his authority in the infamous Georgia prison known as Andersonville, more than 700 survivors applied for military pensions after the war. Many of those men spoke of their captivity to varying degrees, and what they had to say revealed just how they managed to endure an altogether different kind of imprisonment than their white comrades.

Black Voices in the Pensions

“When we were taken prisoners the rebel soldiers stripped us of every thing,” recalled Mingo Hardiman as he gave evidence for his comrade, Pompey Allen, in 1890. He and Allen had served together in the 110th United States Colored Infantry (USCI), composed mostly of formerly enslaved men largely from Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. About 900 men from their regiment, the 106th USCI, and the 111th USCI were captured in northwestern Georgia by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troops at the end of September 1864. Unlike other infamous engagements involving Black soldiers—including the Battle of Fort Pillow just months earlier in April 1864 wherein Gen. Forrest’s soldiers killed 80% of the Black soldiers present—Hardiman, Allen, and their fellow soldiers were taken alive in a series of en masse surrenders that autumn. Like previous captures of Black POWs, including the survivors of Fort Pillow, they were put to work by the Confederacy. Though commanders like Colonel Wallace Campbell (110th USCI) and escaped Black POWs such as Pvt. John Young (111th USCI) could speak to the immediate aftermath of capture, after a certain point U.S. officials knew little of the exact circumstances in which Black POWs found themselves. In the case of 110th USCI, the vast majority of the men ended up in labor camps at Mobile, Alabama and other key locations in the Gulf States, forced to work for the Confederate military and suffering incredible hardships and threats to their lives for the duration. It was thus the POWs themselves, such as Hardiman and Allen, who could speak in depth of being “compelled to work on the rebel fortifications working nearly all the time in water knee deep.” They labored in all weather with hardly any clothing, and the men slept in an “old cotton shed” in the “inclosure of the prison pen” with hardly any covering and few blankets. Hardiman told U.S. Pension Bureau agents how his captors and guards treated the POWs “like hogs,” and that in addition to the indignity of being nearly naked they were also “half starved.” Under such conditions for the seven months, Hardiman noted many of them died and that it was practically impossible for any of the Black soldiers who survived such conditions to come away as sound men. [4]

Such accounts of Black soldiers’ experiences in captivity are not found in published accounts such as the multivolume Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies or white POW memoirs such as Warren Lee Goss’s 1867 Soldier’s Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons. Men like Mingo Hardiman and Pompey Allen lived in the southern states in poverty after the Civil War, were mostly illiterate, and tended to tell their stories among themselves and their trusted communities rather than to potentially hostile audiences, what historian Hilary Green has termed “porch archives.” [5] It is in Black POWs’ pension files that these men narrated captivity in their own voices. Pension records—which can range from just a few pages to several hundred depending on the individual case—combine official records of service with affidavits from comrades, neighbors, relatives, employers, physicians, former enslavers, and U.S. officials. As historians including Donald Shaffer, Brandi Brimmer, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr., and Dale Kretz argue, Black Americans used their access to military pensions to make claims to citizenship into the federal record. More than 700 Black POWs applied for these pensions after the war, and by examining their claims as a collective archive of captivity as well as survival, it is possible to reconstruct these experiences. [6]

These hundreds of applicants revealed much about their time in Confederate hands and the particular threats which they navigated as Black soldiers. The majority like Mingo Hardiman and Pompey Allen were forced to labor for the Confederate army—what can be called military enslavement—or confined in military prisons. As the Confederate war effort began to falter in late 1864, Black labor became ever more vital to maintaining the Confederacy’s white army and men like Hardiman were caught up in Confederates’ increasingly desperate attempts to secure Black people as slaveholders throughout the South resisted enslaved peoples’ impressment and the U.S. army attracted hundreds of thousands of enslaved families away from southern farms, towns, and cities. 

Others, however, endured sale, reclamation by former enslavers (and fraudsters posing as former enslavers), and enslavement by Confederate officers. About a dozen soldiers such as Pvt. Daniel Robinson (46th USCI) and Pvt. Richard Johnson (7th USCI) testified that Confederate officers sold them off to private citizens and slave traders. Sgt. Samuel Johnson (2nd U.S. Colored Cavalry) was one of many Black POWs claimed as property by Confederate officers who forced them to serve as “body servants” or valets. And as many as 250 soldiers from the 44th USCI may have been identified and taken back home by enslavers, as happened to Pvt. Ab Cunningham. These men were at great risk upon facing the retribution of slaveholders from whom they had escaped. Cunningham’s neighbor and fellow reclaimant, Pvt. Abram Ralls (44th USCI), recalled how most of the soldiers from his community who were reclaimed by former enslavers died at their hands. By selling and reclaiming Black POWs as slaves, the Confederacy followed its policy of refusing to treat Black soldiers as legitimate combatants of a sovereign nation, instead treating them as property recovered from an enemy in wartime. In this way, the Confederacy made a clear distinction between Black and white combatants and subjected the U.S. Colored Troops, Black sailors, and even Black valets of white officers to a dangerous status wherein relative safety, information about their situation, and the possibility of their future release were denied them. [7]

Free men from northern states were generally treated more like POWs than their formerly enslaved comrades from southern states. Historians have shown how men of the famous 54th Massachusetts taken prisoner in South Carolina sparked a legal debate over their status. Because Confederate citizens had no existing claims to Black POWs hailing from free states, free born northerners generally remained in military prisons until the war ended. In the meantime, free men suffered immensely in captivity where they were unable to escape the horrors of prison life that included filthy living conditions, rampant disease, starvation and malnutrition, exposure to the elements, as well as severe abuses by guards and even citizen spectators. They suffered alongside white POWs in many prisons throughout the Confederacy with whom they built relationships and aided one another in captivity as best they could under the circumstances. Unlike white POWs, however, there was no question of exchanging them back to the U.S. Only Confederate victory or defeat would determine their fates. [8]

The Power of Numbers

Precise numbers on survivors still remain elusive. The number of Black POWs reclaimed by former enslavers, for example, will likely remain unknown barring future research that uncovers the extent of this practice. Additionally, the records noting which soldiers survived long enough to become POWs are inconsistent. On occasion, for example, a Black soldier was marked as a POW if their fate following an engagement was uncertain, with several dozen later found to have died in action or shortly after capture. Many simply disappeared altogether and have not been found in subsequent records—unless proven otherwise, those men are presumed dead, likely having died in action or in captivity. Several dozen Black soldiers did become POWs but their service records do not include a prisoner of war record—titled “Memorandum from Prisoner of War Records”—and evidence of their captivity is instead mentioned elsewhere in their service record or in a pension file. 

One significant feature of Black POWs’ captivity that makes it difficult to ascertain definitive numbers is that most Black POWs simply never entered spaces that were designated as military prisons. White U.S. soldiers who became POWs did encounter Black POWs at military prisons such as Andersonville in Georgia, Libby Prison in Virginia, and the Old City Jail and Florence Prison in South Carolina. By the end of 1864, however, most Black POWs labored in and around cities where transportation along rail and water were essential to Confederate military operations. Mobile, Alabama became the locus of Black military captivity in the fall of 1864 after Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Bell Hood took nearly 1,000 Black soldiers prisoner and sent them to the city for the express purpose of putting the Black POWs to work. There, hundreds of men including Mingo Hardiman and Pompey Allen repaired crumbling fortifications ringing Mobile Bay and assisted in operations with loading supplies onto Mobile and Ohio Railroad cars. 

Other data, such as the number of escapes and the number of men who received medical treatment of some kind by Confederate doctors, is ever-evolving. Several hundred Black POWs escaped their captors - most often in the immediate days following capture - and several hundred did receive some sort of medical care from doctors at Confederate field hospitals, prison hospitals, and hospitals in military camps and towns. At least 14 men received amputations, but for some this was torture inflicted on them rather than life-saving, necessary care.

Data, however, is just one element of understanding Black POWs’ experiences and lives beyond the war. Testimonies gathered from the pensions is also just the beginning. As research on this group of soldiers continues, particularly with attention paid to survivors’ lives among their families and communities, it will be possible to more fully understand how Black military captivity during the American Civil War was both a continuation of antebellum slavery and an evolution of carceral systems to which Black Americans adapted, negotiated, and survived.

Note: My database on the Civil War’s Black POWs, “The Black Civil War POW Archive,” is forthcoming along with my book, Every Thing but Death: How Black POWs Survived the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2027). It will provide the full list of Black POWs by name, regiment, site of capture, carceral locations, and more.

Notes

[1] Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 108; Benjamin C. Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. Making the Modern South (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 8-9.

[2] Caroline Wood Newhall, “‘Under the Rebel Lash’: Black Prisoners of War in the Confederate South,” Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020; “‘It is not the policy nor the interest of the South to destroy the negro’: Black Prisoners of War and the Intersection of Race, Property, and Law in the Confederacy,” in Lesley J. Gordon and Andrew J. Huebner, eds., Race and Gender at War: Writing Military History (University of Alabama Press, 2024).

[3] Bob O’Connor, for example, has compiled a list of 2,600 names. I have not accessed this list. See https://boboconnorbooks.com/united-states-colored-troops/. 

[4] Case Files of Approved Veterans Who Served in the Army and Navy in the Civil War and the War with Spain, 1861-1934, Records of the Veterans Administration, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C., Mingo Hardiman, deposition, September 5, 1890, in Soldier’s Certificate 722.693, Private Pompey Allen, Company H, 110th United States Colored Infantry. Errors in spelling and grammar are replicated from the original. Many of the USCT regiments were originally designated by state and later reorganized as U.S. regiments, e.g. the 1st North Carolina Colored Infantry was eventually renamed the 35th United States Colored Infantry. All regiments are referred to by their final designations in this essay for clarity.

[5] Hilary N. Green, Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War (Fordham University Press, 2025).

[6] Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (University Press of Kansas, 2004); Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer, eds., Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (New York University Press, 2008); Brandi C. Brimmer, Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke University Press, 2020); Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr., The Families’ Civil War : Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (University of Georgia Press, 2022); Dale Kretz, Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen’s Bureau (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

[7] Case Files of Approved Veterans Who Served in the Army and Navy in the Civil War and the War with Spain, 1861-1934, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C., Soldier's Certificate 1.144.901, Private. Richard Johnson, Co. C, 7th United States Colored Infantry; SC 1.071.808, Pvt. Daniel Robinson aka Govan, 46th USCI; United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901, Series 2, Volume 7, 459-460; Ser. 1, Vol. 39, Part 1, 723-24; SC 934.122, Pvt. Abram Ralls, Co. H, 44th USCI.

[8] Howard C. Westwood, “Captive Black Union Soldiers in Charleston: What to Do?” in Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War, edited by Gregory J.W. Urwin (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); Lorien Foote, Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

Image: United States Army. Military Railway Service, Russell, Andrew J, photographer. Military railroad operations in northern Virginia: African American laborers working on rail. United States, ca. 1862. [or 1863] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2006676178/.