African North Americans and the War - NYTimes.com
Thomas Peter Riggs was not like most soldiers. A private in the 54th Massachusetts regiment, his race would have stood out first to contemporary observers: Riggs was black, and his unit was the first to be organized in the North, after President Lincoln and the Union Army acquiesced to expanding the power of the Emancipation Proclamation with African-Americans fighting as soldiers.
Riggs was striking in other ways. He was freeborn, in Schenectady, N.Y.— not a Southerner and not an ex-slave, as is popularly assumed about members of the United States Colored Troops. But, perhaps most unusual was that, when in March 1863 he went “to Buffalo for the purpose to enlist into a Company of Colored troops, that was there recruited for the 54. Mass. Regt,” he and his traveling companion, John W. Moore, crossed into the United States from Canada, leaving behind their American-born families and work on the warehouse docks of Hamilton, Ontario.
Thomas Peter Riggs was not like most soldiers. A private in the 54th Massachusetts regiment, his race would have stood out first to contemporary observers: Riggs was black, and his unit was the first to be organized in the North, after President Lincoln and the Union Army acquiesced to expanding the power of the Emancipation Proclamation with African-Americans fighting as soldiers.
Riggs was striking in other ways. He was freeborn, in Schenectady, N.Y.— not a Southerner and not an ex-slave, as is popularly assumed about members of the United States Colored Troops. But, perhaps most unusual was that, when in March 1863 he went “to Buffalo for the purpose to enlist into a Company of Colored troops, that was there recruited for the 54. Mass. Regt,” he and his traveling companion, John W. Moore, crossed into the United States from Canada, leaving behind their American-born families and work on the warehouse docks of Hamilton, Ontario.
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