Mercersburg and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts

In the Zion Union Cemetery just off Bennett Avenue in Mercersburg, thirty-eight veterans of the United States Colored Troops from the Civil War are buried. Thirteen of them served with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, the regiment that became the most celebrated Black military unit of the entire war.

The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was organized in eighteen sixty-three, among the first combat units in the Union Army open to African American soldiers. More than twenty percent of its total strength came from Pennsylvania. Mercersburg contributed more volunteers than any other Pennsylvania community outside Philadelphia.

The regiment's assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina in July of eighteen sixty-three, dramatized generations later in the film Glory, ended with devastating losses but proved something the nation needed to see. Black soldiers could and would fight with extraordinary courage. Their valor transformed public and military opinion, accelerating recruitment into the Colored Troops across the North.

The men buried in Mercersburg carried that legacy home with them. Their graves mark a small town's outsized contribution to one of the Civil War's most important stories.