With the promise of freedom and new economic and educational opportunities, Kansas attracted many African Americans in its territorial days, through statehood, and into the 20th century. Slavery existed in the Kansas Territory, but slave holdings were small compared to the South. Many black migrants also came to the territory as hired laborers, while some traveled as escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad. In the 1860s, others joined the Union Army, and some moved from the South in large groups during the Kansas Exodus, a mass migration of freedpeople during the 1870s and 1880s. As a territory that had a long and violent history of pre-Civil War contests over slavery, Kansas emerged as the “quintessential free state” and seemed like a promised land for African Americans who searched for what they called a “New Canaan.”
Less than 40 years after the Civil War, General John G. Haskell, the president of the Kansas Historical Society, described slavery in western Missouri as “a more domestic than commercial institution,” in which the “social habits were those of the farm and not the plantation.” Many of his white contemporaries remembered slavery in a similar way, arguing that conditions were much more favorable on the farms of western Missouri than in the cotton fields of the Deep South.
At the Battle of Island Mound, the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers became the first known African American regiment to fight in a skirmish on behalf of the Union.
The 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry (later the 79th U.S. Colored Infantry) was an African American regiment that served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. The regiment was organized prior to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and without federal authorization, thus becoming the first black unit to see combat alongside white soldiers during the war in October 1862.
The small skirmish that occurred on October 29, 1862, at Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri, was significant because it marked the first time during the American Civil War that a regiment of African American soldiers saw combat. The 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers who fought at Island Mound were in Kansas service prior to the Emancipation Proclamation’s implementation on January 1, 1863, but not in U.S. service because the Lincoln administration was reluctant to enroll black troops and risk tipping Union slave states, including Missouri, toward the Confederacy.
At the Battle of Island Mound, the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers becomes the first known African American regiment to fight in a skirmish on behalf of the Union.
