Unmarked but far from forgotten

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. - For more than a century, the bodies of about 300 black soldiers who died in the Civil War have lain in unmarked graves on the bank of Skull Creek harbor.

These former slaves who fled the plantations to fight for freedom on the side of the Union Army are unknown heroes.

The small plot of land where they are buried is overshadowed by multimillion-dollar condos and a private marina - symbols of the transformation that has occurred in Hilton Head over the last 50 years, changing the island from a predominantly black town to one of gated communities for the wealthy.

But for Howard Wright, 57, the great-great-grandson of a former slave who fought in the war, Talbird Cemetery is part of his family's heritage and, he said, an integral part of American history that should not be forgotten.

So he has set out on a mission to get the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide headstones for the more than 3,000 blacks in South Carolina who served in what was called the U.S. Colored Troops. In recent months, he has received 300 markers from the department, including one for his great-great-grandfather, Caesar Kirk-Jones, who died in 1903 at 74.

"History has been rewritten when it comes to the legacy of the colored troops," said Wright, a historian who founded the Sankofa Restoration Project. "They came in fighting with their weapons blazing. They had more at stake than anyone else and they turned around the destiny of this country."

Wright has spent 25 years researching the histories of the men buried at Talbird Cemetery, as well as more than 1,000 other black Civil War soldiers at some 100 similar cemeteries in Beaufort County, S.C. More than 1,000 black soldiers are buried in a formerly segregated section of the Beaufort National Cemetery.

According to Wright, about 300 black soldiers have yet to be identified at Talbird, Hilton Head's largest black cemetery. For the descendants to have relatives who died fighting in a war that ended slavery, it is considered an honor that they speak of with pride.

"Every black family in Hilton Head has someone buried here," Wright said. "So this is important to a lot of people."

But Wright's work does not stop there. He said his goal is to have headstones placed on the graves of all 200,000 black Union veterans nationwide.The role of black soldiers in the Civil War always has been controversial, with advocates arguing that they have never received proper recognition.

At the beginning of the war in 1861, free blacks rushed to join the Union Army but were turned away because of a 1792 federal law barring free blacks from bearing arms for the Army. Though President Abraham Lincoln early on considered recruiting black troops, he feared that it would cause more states to secede from the Union.

But as the war raged on and fewer whites signed up, Congress passed a law in 1862 freeing slaves whose owners were fighting on the side of the Confederacy. next Shortly thereafter, Lincoln presented a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, which gave freedom to all slaves in the Confederate states and made them eligible to fight in the U.S. military.

The Army's first formal black regiment, the First South Carolina Voluntary Infantry, was formed in Beaufort County, a primary battleground in the Civil War.

"We are talking about people who made the ultimate sacrifice, people who went without pay for months and months because of their dedication to this cause, people who wanted to fight," said Wright.

By the end of the war in 1865, about 180,000 black men were in the Army. An additional 20,000 served in the Navy. Black women signed up as nurses, spies and scouts, the most famous being Harriet Tubman, who helped establish the Underground Railroad and was a scout for the 2d South Carolina Volunteers.

Over the course of the war, nearly 40,000 black soldiers died. For Wright, that is a sacrifice worth noting.

Almost a century and a half later, he said, "nobody ever said thank you to them. This is the first time all the families in South Carolina will be able to say thank you to their ancestors who fought in this war."