Island Mound: The First Black Combat Regiment

On a cold morning in late October of eighteen sixty-two, somewhere in the weedy bottomland of Bates County, Missouri, American history turned a corner that most textbooks never mention.

The First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry had crossed into Missouri on October twenty-seventh. They were not yet officially mustered into federal service. Many of the men were escaped slaves from Missouri and Arkansas farms who had walked to freedom in Kansas and picked up a rifle almost immediately. Senator Jim Lane of Kansas had begun recruiting them in August, three months before the Emancipation Proclamation and a full year before the federal government formally authorized Black regiments.

On October twenty-ninth, a detachment of about thirty men was sent out as a diversion while a larger foraging party hunted for salt and cornmeal. They encountered a force of Confederate bushwhackers, irregular guerrillas who had been terrorizing the Missouri-Kansas border for months. What followed was close, brutal fighting. The Union side lost eight men killed, a white officer, six Black soldiers, and one Cherokee member of the regiment named John Six Killer, and eleven more were wounded.

The Confederates broke and fled. Some estimates put their dead at thirty to forty.

The significance was enormous and the reaction was swift. Newspapers across the North reported it. The old racist argument that Black men would not fight, could not fight, fell apart in a Missouri cornfield. The soldiers of the First Kansas had charged, traded fire at close range, and held their ground.

The Union Army took official notice. When the federal government finally authorized Black regiments under the Bureau of Colored Troops in eighteen sixty-three, the hard work of Island Mound had already proved the case. The regiment itself went on to fight in more than a dozen engagements, including the Battle of Honey Springs in Indian Territory.

There is a state historic site near here now. A few interpretive markers stand in the fields of Bates County. The ground looks like any other Missouri pasture, flat, quiet, unremarkable. But on October twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-two, it was where the United States Army first learned, in blood, that it had been wrong about the men it was finally willing to arm.