In October 1892, a group of Civil War veterans gathered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and one of their own stood up to set the record straight.

Frederick Hitchcock knew what he was talking about. As Colonel of the 25th United States Colored Troops — a Philadelphia-recruited regiment that served in Louisiana and Florida during the Civil War— he had led Black soldiers in the field and watched them perform under the pressures of war.

When his fellow veterans called on him to respond to the toast “The Colored Troops Fought Nobly,” Hitchcock offered an incisive reflection. He paid them what the Scranton Republican called “a glowing tribute” to his Black comrades and then he turned his attention to the way those same men were being treated in the decades since the war ended.

Hitchcock pushed back against the Lost Cause narrative taking root in the postwar South – the effort to minimize and denigrate the contributions of the nearly 200,000 Black men who wore Union blue. He argued that their loyalty had been absolute, their service indispensable, and that the nation’s failure to honor that sacrifice was, in his words, “an everlasting shame.”

Here’s the report about what Colonel Frederick Hitchcock told his fellow veterans in Scranton that fall evening in 1892:

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Col. Hitchcock was called upon to respond to the sentiment ‘The Colored Troops Fought Nobly.’

The Colonel commanded colored troops during the war and as one well acquainted with their conduct on the battle field he paid them a glowing tribute.

Then referring to the manner in which colored men are treated since the close of the war Col. Hitchcock said it was an everlasting shame that this race which had 200,000 brave men in the Union army should receive the treatment they do in this land of boasted freedom and said that God would not long prosper such an ungrateful country.

‘It is yet to be recorded that there was one disloyal colored man in the United States. They were of the greatest assistance to the union white soldiers in the southern country. They helped the trapped soldier to escape, brought him food and clothes and in every way performed such services as can never be forgotten.’

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Read more about the Civil War and its legacy in the Coal Region

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How Schuylkill County Civil War Veterans Opposed Confederate Monuments in 1903

A lament for the loss of living memory of the Civil War | 1929

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