Tobacco Factory in Virginia
On the great canvas of history on which the history of the regiment is depicted, men emerged marked to do tremendous things: the Yankee commander who led them through the crucible of battle and the chaplain who bound up their physical and moral wounds.

The First Regiment, United States Colored Troops was organized and trained in the District of Columbia in the Spring and Summer of 1863 and was the first such organization of its kind formally mustered into the federal service. The regiment was also the first of its kind organized in the Middle Atlantic States. Led by white officers, the regiment drew men of African descent not only from the District but also from Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, New England, Canada, and the West Indies. The regimental chaplain was the famed Henry McNeal Turner who pastored Israel Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church at the foot of Capitol Hill during the 1860’s.

Turner’s erudition and oratory were already legendary by the time he arrived in what was then called Washington City. Born free in South Carolina in the 1830’s, Turner defied local laws and customs to acquire the rudiments of an education. In the 1850’s, he became a minister and joined the AME church. From that moment, his intellect blossomed and all his hidden talents burst forth. Turner’s newspaper articles, sermons and vivid recollections are essential sources in the reconstruction of the history of the regiment. It is also evident that his service as one of the first African American army chaplains would figure prominently in his later life as church bishop, civil rights activist, government official, and politician.

As chaplain of a black regiment in the Civil War, Turner was more than a minister appointed to serve in a religious capacity with a military unit. He was a teacher to ex-slaves desperate to learn the secrets of the written word and unlock the power of mathematics. He was a doctor not only to those wounded in battle but also to those whose spirits had been torn by the degradation of enslavement.

Each day Turner saw the sacrifices his fellow soldiers made as they fought, bled, suffered and died, not only for themselves but also for freedom and posterity.

The regiment distinguished itself in combat in Virginia and North Carolina, participating in some of the Civil War’s most famous battles, including: Chaffin’s Farm, Fair Oaks, and Fort Fisher. At the battle of Wilson’s Wharf, the regiment participated in the only battle in Virginia, possibly the only one in the entire Civil War in which nearly all the Union troops were African American. The battle proved once and for all that black troops

would fight on their own without extensive support from white soldiers.