This article explores the experiences of Civil War Union soldiers. By Wayne Ince
Trump’s Freedom 250 leaves Black America on the cutting room floor. Not
by accident. On purpose. He wants a 250th birthday party for a country
Africans helped build, bled for, and died defending, while pretending we
were never in the room.
Freedom 250’s missing chapters
The official Freedom 250 push is sold as a national reflection on 250 years
of American history. In practice, Trump’s version centers white grievance,
flatters Confederate nostalgia, and treats Black excellence as an
inconvenient edit.
Leaving Black Americans out is not ignorance. It is a story choice. Admit
that Black genius, labor, and sacrifice built this country, and you have to
admit one more thing. Voter suppression, racial gerrymandering, book
bans, and curriculum gag orders attack the people who built the house.
A veteran’s ledger of debt
I spent 23 years in uniform. I watched Black soldiers, sailors, airmen, and
Marines do the quiet work that keeps this republic alive. None of it started
in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf. It started in a country that took
our labor, took our bodies, took our freedom, and still expected us to salute
the flag we helped stitch together.
Trump wants the cake, the fireworks, and the patriotic soundtrack. He does
not want the receipts. The receipts show who paid the bill. That is why a
man like Robert Smalls never makes his script.
The man the Confederacy misjudged
Robert Smalls was born enslaved in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839. The
Confederacy saw him as cargo with a heartbeat, one more line on a
plantation ledger. When the war began, they put him to work aboard the
Confederate transport ship CSS Planter in Charleston Harbor.
Smalls used that job to gather what his captors never valued in him.
Operational expertise. He learned the harbor, the currents, the forts, and
the signals the Confederates used to move ships in and out. It was the most
heavily defended port in the South.
The night the Planter defected
In the early hours of May 13, 1862, the white officers slept ashore. Smalls
and his Black crewmates did not. He eased the Planter away from the
Charleston dock. He stopped to pick up his wife, his children, and other
enslaved passengers. Next, he steered a Confederate warship straight past
the Confederate forts.
He wore the captain’s coat and hat. He gave the correct signals. Then he slipped
past batteries that had shredded Union ships weeks before. But, only when he
cleared Fort Sumter’s guns did he raise a white flag and run for the Union
blockade. He handed the United States Navy a ship, its guns, and a map of
Charleston’s defenses.
The Union did what the South refused to do. It recognized his worth. Smalls
became a war hero in the North. He became the first Black man to captain a
vessel in U.S. service. After the war he won a seat in the South Carolina
legislature, later, in the U.S. House of Representatives. He did it in the state
that once claimed to own him.
Two Americas in one harbor
In one night out of Charleston Harbor, two Americas looked at the same
Black man. They came to opposite conclusions.
To the Confederacy, Smalls was a slave. Fit to be ordered, beaten, or
conscripted. Never trusted with real authority. To the Union, he was a pilot,
a commander, and in time an elected official.
The South saw property. The North saw expertise.
The South gambled it could use Black skill without ever risking Black
power. It was wrong about Smalls. It is wrong about us now. That tension
never died. It just changed uniforms.
None of this makes the North a paradise. Racism lived on both sides of the
Mason-Dixon line. But the structural difference is real. Black troops in the
Union Army, most of them formerly enslaved, found pathways to wages,
pensions, and political office. Smalls is the proof. Enslaved pilot, Union
captain, United States Congressman, one straight line.
Smalls did not stand alone
Smalls was not a lucky exception the Confederacy happened to miss. Black
men and women were central to the Union war. Trump’s history erases
every one of them.
Frederick Douglass spent the war demanding the Union arm Black men.
“Men of Color, To Arms,” he wrote. He recruited soldiers, his own sons
among them, and pressed Lincoln to make emancipation the purpose of the
fight.
William D. Matthews raised a company of Black troops in Kansas before
Washington would agree to pay them. He drilled them. He led them. The
Army still denied him a captain’s commission, for one reason. He was Black.
The 54th Massachusetts answered Douglass’s call. On July 18, 1863, they
charged the sand walls of Fort Wagner into point-blank fire. When the colorbearer fell, Sergeant William Carney caught the flag, carried it forward
through his wounds, and brought it back. He earned the Medal of Honor.
The regiment settled on open ground a question the country kept dodging.
Black men would die for a freedom the law still denied them.
Mary Richards carried a quieter weapon. Born enslaved, schooled in the
North, she walked back into the Confederate White House as a servant and
a Union spy. She read the papers Jefferson Davis left on his desk. She
remembered them. She passed them north while the men around her
assumed a Black woman could not read at all.
That assumption is the whole engine. Black skill is safe to use. Black
authority is the threat. The Confederacy bet its life on that line and lost.
The bet is back, in uniform.
In February 2025, Trump fired General C.Q. Brown, the second Black officer
ever to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No reason was given. Before he took
office, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had already done his part. In
print, he questioned whether Brown earned the job or got it for his skin
color. In September, Trump signed an executive order telling the Pentagon
to call itself the Department of War, a name only Congress can make
official, and Hegseth scrubbed diversity programs across the force.
The logic has not moved an inch since Charleston Harbor. Use the Black
soldier. Praise him on the right day. Then make sure he never holds the
wheel.
From slave patrols to voter patrols
The Confederacy did not cling to slavery out of ignorance. It clung to
slavery because bondage kept white political power locked in place.
Enslaved labor built Southern wealth. The three-fifths clause inflated
Southern political power. When abolitionists pushed for freedom,
slaveholders heard a threat to their monopoly.
That operating system never shut down. It runs on new hardware now.
Modern laws target Black voters while claiming to be colorblind. In 2013,
the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.
States moved within hours. Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia passed
strict voter ID rules, closed polling places in Black neighborhoods, purged
the rolls, and cut early voting. Courts struck several of these laws down.
North Carolina’s, one federal court found, targeted Black voters with almost
surgical precision.
The tricks have new names. Exact-match registration rules. Aggressive roll
purges. Laws that make it a crime to hand water to people stuck in line for
hours. Penalties for helping disabled voters cast a ballot. Gerrymanders that
slice Black neighborhoods across districts so their votes cancel out.
Slave patrols rode the plantations to control Black movement. Voter patrols
ride the law books to control the Black ballot.
The war on memory
You cannot celebrate 250 years of history while you criminalize teaching it.
Yet that is the project. Ban “divisive concepts.” Attack any honest account
of structural racism. Punish teachers who put slavery, Jim Crow, or mass
incarceration in context. One state standard recast slavery as “involuntary
relocation.”
Erasing Black heroes from textbooks is not an oversight. It is a weapon. Cut
Smalls steering the Planter to freedom. Cut Harriet Tubman leading armed
raids. Cut the Black sailors and soldiers whose names never reached a
monument. Do that, and you can keep selling the lie that Black Americans
gave this country nothing but crime statistics.
This is the same war Smalls fought, in another form. The Confederacy
needed him to stay a faceless laborer who knew the water but never owned
his knowledge. Today’s culture warriors need Black contribution to stay
invisible, or to look like a gift from white hands. A textbook that erases
Smalls is doing political work. It builds an electorate that sees Black
presence without Black significance.
Black service, muted and misrepresented
From the Revolution to Afghanistan, Black Americans have fought under a
flag that did not always fight for them. In the Civil War alone, nearly
180,000 Black soldiers served the Union. About 40,000 died. That sacrifice
helped break the Confederacy.
The pattern repeats in every war since. Fight abroad. Come home to
second-class citizenship. Then get told your story is “divisive” if you
mention it.
Smalls risked his life for the Union, then risked his career for
Reconstruction. He fought for Black voting rights and Black schools until
white terror and federal retreat choked off the gains. His life refutes every
lie that paints us as passengers on the American journey instead of
navigators.
In the Freedom 250 script, men like Smalls vanish. The Black regiments
vanish. The Black women who organized, taught, marched, and sued vanish.
Those absences are not accidents. They are edits, made to keep one
audience comfortable and one story intact.
Freedom 250 or Freedom 2.5?
At the center of this nationalism sits a lie. That Black people either gave
nothing or gave only disorder. To keep the lie alive, you overpolice Black
communities and underprotect them. You overpunish Black defendants and
look away from the powerful. You underfund Black schools, then blame
Black children for the result.
Trump’s America will let Black people entertain, score touchdowns, and
sing the anthem. It will not let them rewrite the civics textbook or redraw
the district lines.
Strip Black Americans from the Freedom 250 story and you do more than
insult Black veterans. You redefine freedom as a gated privilege. You toast
the date on the Declaration and erase the people who made its promise real.
Smalls took a Confederate ship called the Planter and turned it into a
freedom vehicle for his family, his crew, and the Union. Today’s voter
suppression, book bans, and anti-Black policy are trying to sail that ship
back into Confederate waters.
The choice at this country’s 250th birthday is the choice from Charleston
Harbor in 1862. Treat Black expertise, sacrifice, and leadership as fuel for
the American project. Or chain it to the dock and pretend the vessel cannot
move without white hands on the wheel.
I spent 23 years swearing an oath to one of those Americas. It is not the one
that writes Robert Smalls out of the script.
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