Picks and Shovels Before Rifles and Bayonets: The U.S. Army’s Impressment of Black Kentuckians

In Kentucky during the Civil War, African Americans served as coerced laborers in the U.S. Army before they were embraced as free people or soldiers. Authorities impressed over 1,900 Black people to conduct hard labor for the military in direct opposition to the hopes and pursuits of African Americans seeking emancipation, civil rights, and racial equality. Kentucky thus demonstrates the army’s conflicting roles as liberator and racially oppressive. The U.S. Army made use of Black Kentuckians throughout the Civil War, but whether these men found themselves impressed enslaved laborers or free soldiers was shaped by the shifting calculus of military necessity.