Growing up, most of us probably learned that when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, the U.S. Civil War effectively came to an end.

What is less well known is that among the Union forces at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, were seven black regiments. One was the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry from Illinois. Formed in Quincy, in April 1864. The 29th eventually numbered about 2,000 men.

In the week leading up to the surrender at Appomattox, Union troops, both white and black, were closing in on Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. After a nine-month siege, Grant’s forces, including the 29th, succeeded in taking Petersburg, the Confederates’ major transportation and supply center. On April 3, the 29th marched into Petersburg jubilantly singing “John Brown’s Body.”

That night, the 29th continued with the white troops and other black regiments toward Appomattox. One soldier described the Union line as “looking like a blue checkerboard, the white and black troops advancing together” (United States Colored Troops National Park Service bulletin).

Muster rolls of Illinois men in the Civil War identify 18 men in the 29th US Colored Infantry as residing in towns or townships around Bureau County like Princeton, Dover and Concord Township. (They also list the names of 26 other men from Bureau County in the 8th and 13th US Colored Artillery units.)

Though there were free men in what the Union designated the United States Colored Troops, the majority had been born into slavery and escaped to Union lines amidst the war. The “nativity” of almost all the Bureau County men in the 29th is recorded as either a border state (Missouri or Kentucky) or a Confederate state (Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana). We know from newspaper accounts that some were brought to Bureau County with a white Union officer from the area.

The Bureau County men were mustered into the 29th early in 1865, either at Peoria or Cairo. The majority were 18, 19, or 20 years old. Their occupation was invariably listed as farmer or laborer.

Some returned to Bureau County at war’s end and lived in the area the rest of their lives. One was Charles Moses who married Priscilla Parham, also a former slave, at the Bureau County Courthouse in December 1865. They raised a large family in a house on Marion Street while Charles worked as a laborer and teamster. They and several of their children are buried at Princeton’s Oakland Cemetery.

Another veteran of the 29th, Abraham Harrison, also returned to Princeton and worked as a laborer. There would occasionally be a demeaning or derogatory reference to him or other black residents in one of the town’s newspapers. Use of derogatory words in local papers in the 19th century, and well into the twentieth, was not uncommon.

An exception was usually the respectful coverage given the Emancipation Day celebration hosted by Princeton’s black community for many years after the Civil War. It was a huge affair that began with a parade from the depot to the Fairgrounds to hear addresses by black and white speakers.

In 1883, Harrison, as President of Princeton’s Emancipation Day that year, led the procession. He, like Charles Moses, is buried at Oakland Cemetery. Neither of them, nor any other veterans from the 29th, appear among the 3,100 Civil War soldiers whose names are engraved on Princeton’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

The recognition and rights long due to black Americans was addressed by the 29th’s Sergeant Major William McCoslin of Quincy: “We, the colored soldiers, have fairly won our rights by loyalty and bravery, shall we obtain them? If they are refused now, we shall demand them.”

It took the Civil Rights Movement a century later for black Americans to obtain them. With the recent suppression of voting rights in many states, the freedom struggle that engaged the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry almost 160 years ago continues today.