Mapping the USCT in the Civil War

The purpose of Mapping the United States Colored Troops (USCT) is to tell the story of each USCT regiment by spatially analyzing the reported birthplaces and enlistment locations of the individual soldiers listed in the descriptive muster rolls. Using this data, the department hopes to decipher stories many thought would be lost to time.

This will achieve two objectives: The first is to depict in the most detailed way possible the diverse background of each Black soldier who enlisted in those regiments and shed light on thousands of individual stories – most of which lack any archival footprint beyond these muster rolls.

The second is to explore soldier motivation – a historiography that commonly leaves out the Black troops of the USCTs – by analyzing this data in relation to the broader narrative of the Civil War. This will be accomplished by transcribing the original descriptive muster rolls of each USCT into Excel format and then mapping each one in ArcGIS. Within this GIS model, viewers can see where each Black soldier reported they were born and where they enlisted in the USCT. Viewers will also have rapid access to digitized data of all these soldiers and each regiment’s full muster roll.