Engaged At Cabin Creek: The First Kansas Colored Infantry’s First Action of the American Civil War

Abstract

“Wherever [B]lack regiments were engaged in battle during the Civil War, they acquitted themselves in a manner which fully justified the policy of the Government in enlisting their services” (p. 52, Fox’s Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1889). This quote aptly describes the First Kansas Colored Infantry of the United States Army in the American Civil War. Their story involves loss, sacrifice, and tragedy and serves as a microcosm of the American experience of the Civil War. The regiment started as an unapproved presidential experiment as Kansas Senator James Lane started efforts to recruit fugitive slaves, free African-Americans, and slaves who had been “liberated” by marauding Jayhawkers into Missouri in 1862. Liberated being the operative term as they were often coerced into the regiment once brought across the state boundary.