A Kansas memorial lists 15 Black soldiers killed during the Civil War. Their lives are a mystery.

This memorial at Fort Scott National Cemetery commemorates the 15 Black soldiers killed in May 1863 near Sherwood, Missouri. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

FORT SCOTT — At the national cemetery there is peace.

There is no news to report, no current affairs to parse, no urgent interview requests awaiting any of the 8,000 inhabitants. All the battles have been fought, the costs tallied, the names and the dates etched into marble stones 13 inches wide and 4 inches thick. The stones stand in regimented rows across the cemetery’s 28 acres of rolling hills.

On this afternoon in May, the scudded sky seems particularly broad and the hills unusually green. The only sound is the wind whispering through the trees and animating the flag at half-staff on the cemetery’s highest point.

Officially designated as National Cemetery No. 1 and established Nov. 15, 1862, it was the first among the 14 cemeteries designated by Abraham Lincoln to accommodate the grim harvest of the Civil War. Like many other national cemeteries, including the one at Gettysburg, the Fort Scott site is administered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The first military burials were of those who died of accident or disease at the federal military post that gave this town in southeastern Kansas its name. In addition to the fort, there was also a two-story military prison here, so some of the early occupants were Confederates who died as prisoners. It wasn’t a national cemetery to begin with, but the “Presbyterian Graveyard” at the edge of town, and the first graves were marked with wooden boards and stakes, according to its National Register of Historic Places registration.

Only a few hundred of those interred here died in combat, as the vast majority of plots are those of veterans and their spouses, from the Civil War era to the present day. The most famous grave, if there can be fame in death, is not marked by a flat white standing stone, but by a red sandstone boulder.

The boulder marks the grave of Eugene F. Ware, a name most Kansans won’t know today. His wife, Jeannette, is buried with him.

Ware was an officer in an Iowa cavalry regiment who, in 1864, participated in the “Indian War” with the plains nations across the West. He settled in Kansas in 1867 and pursued a number of occupations: farmer, saddle shop proprietor, and editor of the Fort Scott Monitor. He joined a law practice after being admitted to the bar and was later elected to the Kansas Senate. He wrote books about water rights law and military history.

But Ware was most famous as a poet.

Under the pseudonym “Ironquill,” Ware turned out popular verse that relied on easy rhymes and heavy sentimentality. An early poem, and considered by many his best, was “The Washerwoman’s Song,” in which an agnostic narrator watches with some longing while a working woman scrubs clothes while singing a consoling hymn.

Ware died in 1911.

The sandstone boulder has been so robbed of significance by the passage of time and taste that it now seems as cryptic as the ruins in “Ozymandias.” It is difficult to find any contemporary value in Ware’s work. His racist views about Native Americans, whom he considered inferior to whites, is disturbing, but unsurprising for the time.

Some of the cemetery’s original inhabitants are 17 indigenous soldiers from the Civil War. All were refugees who fled Indian Territory to Kansas in 1861 and 1862 and were organized as private soldiers into state home guard units. Most of these 17 died at the post hospital, according to the national register, and little is known about them other than their names — Deer-in-Water, Set-Them-Up — and the maladies that killed them, including pneumonia and typhoid fever.

Every individual interred in this country of the dead, whether poet or private, left behind a life written not in stone but in flesh and blood with the sky as witness. The clouds do not pass judgment. All are equal here.

But there are 15 names on a stone monument in a shoulder of the cemetery that stand as a testament to the struggle for a living equality. These individuals are not buried here, because their bodies were literally consumed by the fire of war. They were soldiers of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, and they died on a Missouri farm about 60 miles to the southeast.

Their story is that of the first Black soldiers to fight in the Civil War.

The 1989 Edward Zwick film “Glory” depicts the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, a regiment of Black enlisted men and white officers, and its true-life assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. That battle took place in July 1863, and the movie has shaped the popular conception of Black troops in the Civil War.

But the First Kansas Colored Infantry engaged Confederate forces on Oct. 29, 1862, at the Battle of Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri. It was a fight near the Marais des Cygnes River between 240 Kansas soldiers and perhaps 400 pro-slavery guerillas. The Kansans had established a fortified position, called “Fort Africa,” that was assaulted by mounted guerillas, known regionally as “bushwhackers.” The fight, which was more of a skirmish than a battle, resulted in the deaths of eight Kansas soldiers and an unknown number of rebels. It was nearly lost in the historic record, overshadowed by battles involving thousands of troops, but its significance transcends its numbers.

Island Mound took place months before any Black units were federalized following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863. The First Kansas Colored were serving as a state guard unit, not yet as part of the regular army.

The regiment had been organized by Jim Lane, a U.S. senator from Kansas, a radical Republican, and the “grim chieftain” of Jayhawker irregulars in the years immediately before the war. Lane was not authorized to form a Black regiment, but he did so anyway. Leavenworth was the headquarters for the recruiting effort, but the First Colored Kansas was composed of free men and formerly enslaved individuals from a wide area.

In his 2021 book, “Soldiers in the Army of Freedom,” historian Ian Michael Spurgeon recounts that 40% of the men who joined the regiment in 1862 listed Missouri as their place of residence.

“They were from Independence, Lexington, Lafayette, Pleasantville, St. Louis, and other cities,” Spurgeon writes. “They came from farms in Clay, Howard, Buchanan, Randolph, Platte, Morgan, Henry, and other counties. After Missouri, most recruits that fall claimed Kentucky as their home state. It is not known how many traveled directly from Kentucky to Kansas on their own or had been brought to Missouri by their owners.”

The men who had formerly been enslaved were officially designated as “contraband.” Although the war was being fought to end slavery and preserve the Union, Black recruits were generally regarded with suspicion and even hostility. Some in the regular army were resentful, believing that Black soldiers were inferior and unsuited for combat. Even those who were sympathetic suggested that such units be given supporting roles, such as contributing the hard labor for a telegraph line across eastern Kansas. Even Lane, who was in charge of recruiting, once suggested that every white soldier be assigned a Black servant.

But the First Colored Kansas was recruited to fight.

In the beginning, they didn’t even have the blue uniforms that were standard for Union troops or reliable weapons with in which to fight. Their uniforms were the older, pre-war gray uniforms, and their weapons were inferior to the Springfield rifles carried by most white soldiers.

“By all accounts, the men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry found themselves holding virtually worthless weapons,” Spurgeon writes. The guns were likely cheap imported muskets purchased earlier in the war, and not one in five would discharge reliably.

The Black troops received less than half the pay of white soldiers — just $7 a month. At least, that was what they were supposed to get. The First Kansas Colored went unpaid for all of their state service and for months after it was federalized. Desertion was a common problem in the early months of the regiment.

So was insubordination.

Private Henry Aggleston was sentenced to 20 days of hard labor for “mutinous conduct and contentious language” to a superior officer, as well as insubordination and unsoldier-like conduct in camp.

Eventually, the regiment was dispatched to Fort Lincoln, Kansas, about 15 miles northwest of Fort Scott. It was given the assignment to march into Missouri and harass Confederate guerillas, leading to the fight at Island Mound.

The regiment was mustered into federal service Jan. 13, 1863, at Fort Scott. A rousing speech was given by Capt. William Mathews, a free black man and commander of Company D.

“Now is our time to strike,” Mathews exhorted. “Our own exertions and our own muscle must make us men. If we fight we shall be respected. I see that a well-licked man respects the one who thrashes him.”

Unfortunately for Mathews, he was not allowed to carry his rank into federal service. Only white officers would be allowed. Later, an order would be discovered that restored Mathews to captain, but it is unclear whether that instruction was never delivered or simply ignored.

In May 1863, the regiment was ordered to Baxter Springs, in extreme southeastern Kansas. A foraging party of about 25 ventured into Missouri and stopped at the home of Andrew Rader near Sherwood, in Jasper County. While tossing corn from an attic into wagons below, the Black soldiers were attacked by a mounted guerilla force led by Thomas Livingston. The 67 men under Livingston’s command were armed with braces of revolvers and other weapons. The Kansas infantry had stacked their muskets in the yard, out of reach from the attic.

The federal officers and some mounted artillery soldiers rode away, leaving the Black soldiers to face the guerillas alone. Thirteen were killed on the spot and their bodies mutilated. Two were taken prisoner, and both were later executed when a prisoner exchange failed.

Private Henry Aggleston was among the dead. He was about 22, according to military records.

Upon returning to Sherwood, the Union forces discovered the atrocity. Finding no shovels with which to bury the dead, they set fire to the Rader home, cremating the bodies of the Black infantrymen inside. They then burned the town of Sherwood in retaliation, effectively erasing it from the map.

For the First Colored Kansas, there would be many more bloody fights, from Cabin Creek in what is now Oklahoma to Poison Spring, Arkansas. At Poison Spring, dozens of Black infantrymen taken prisoner were executed by Confederates. Their bodies were mutilated, as had happened at Sherwood, but an element of the macabre was introduced at Poison Spring — the bodies of the dead were placed in absurd positions and skulls were crushed for sport beneath wagon wheels.

“Where is the First (N-word) now?” was a taunt hurled during the atrocity, Spurgeon writes. “All cut to pieces and gone to hell by bad management.”

The First Colored Kansas suffered unusually high losses, Spurgeon notes, with an attrition rate of more than 60%. More of its soldiers died in battle than of disease, unusual for a Civil War unit. Of the 1,505 men who served, only 521 were left when the regiment was mustered out Oct. 1, 1865, at Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Researching the story of the regiment was made difficult, Spurgeon recounts, by the scarcity of personal histories. While it was a tradition among white Civil War soldiers and civilians to meticulously document their lives through letters and official correspondence, Black troops did not leave copious personal accounts for later historians to rely upon. Until recently the Civil War has been largely treated by scholars as a white man’s war, even though the object of the war was ending the enslavement of Blacks.

Lane, the Kansas senator and former Jayhawker who organized the regiment, died in 1866, after shooting himself in the head on a Lawrence Street. At war’s end he had switched allegiances from the Radical Republicans to President Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, and found himself in political chaos and financial turmoil. He is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery at Lawrence.

The stories of Henry Aggleston and the 14 other Black soldiers who perished at Sherwood remain ciphers under the American sky, even though their names are etched in stone on a monument at the national cemetery at Fort Scott. Historians like Spurgeon have justly teased the end of their stories from the official record, but their lives remain largely undiscovered.

To seek these stories is to confer in death a measure of the equality they fought for in life.