Published March 14, 2024
By Reg Ankrom
Louis Martin
On January 25, 1892, neighbor Carrie Boone found the body of her black friend Lewis Martin cold in his bed. It was Boone’s habit to look in on the 52-year-old Civil War veteran at the home he owned at the intersection of Lincoln and Jefferson Streets in Springfield. It was one of the properties Martin bought with pension money he earned as a disabled veteran.
Nineteenth century Springfield residents knew Martin for his visible sacrifice as a soldier in the cause of freedom and the Union during the Civil War. Today’s students of that war know him for the same reason. A photograph Dr. Reed Bontecou, a surgeon at the Harewood U.S. Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., took of Martin during his recovery from the amputation of his right arm and left leg is one of the most recognized photos of the Civil War.
Martin had been born a slave in Arkansas, but military records show him as a free man when in February 1864, he joined the First Regiment Illinois Volunteers (Colored) organized in Quincy four months earlier. The First Illinois was the only regiment of black soldiers this state organized during the Civil War. Newspaper reports indicate that reasons for organizing the black regiment were less than noble.
Governor Richard Yates had become aggravated that black volunteers recruited in Illinois were satisfying quotas of other states. One of the most successful recruiters was Pennsylvanian Martin Robinson Delany, an African American abolitionist whose agent in Quincy recruited fugitive slaves from Missouri and sent them to fill regimental ranks—and military quotas—in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Seeking to satisfy Illinois’ draft quotas, Yates in July 1863 ordered a halt to recruitments that served federal quotas of other states and issued an order to raise a regiment of black troops in Illinois. The governor was aware that an application to raise a “Negro Regiment” had been sent to the War Department. The September 14, 1863, Quincy Daily Herald verified that a group of leading Quincy Republicans asked Washington “for authority to raise a negro regiment here.”
Some criticized the Quincy effort, doubting the abilities of blacks as soldiers. The September 19, 1863, Quincy Whig and Republican responded: “Colored soldiers do not fight better than white men, but they fight better than rebellious Texans.” The Whig supported black troops for other reasons: each black recruit counted toward the state’s quota for volunteers, and black recruits would reduce the number of whites subject to the draft under the recently enacted Conscription Act.
By the end of January 1864, the Quincy Herald reported that 500 Negro men were in Quincy for supply and training. Company A, called the Quincy Company, was made up largely of fugitive slaves from Missouri’s Lewis, Marion, Pike, and Ralls Counties.
His military service record reports that Lewis Martin on February 9, 1864, joined Company E of the First Illinois Regiment at Upper Alton. The document described him as 24 years old, 6 feet 2 inches tall, dark complexion, black eyes and hair, and listed his occupation as farmer. The record also showed that an escape from slavery was not Martin’s reason for enlisting. He had been freed in Arkansas before the war began. Being free did not mean he was welcome in Illinois.
From the time it became a territory in 1809, Illinois discouraged free blacks from entering. In 1848, Illinoisans ratified a state constitution that ended slavery, but it also required the legislature to enact laws prohibiting blacks from moving into the state. The federal census of 1860 revealed that the laws against black immigration were effective. The ratio of one “free colored” for every 5,500 whites in Illinois in 1850 had declined to one for every 7,500 whites by 1860.
At the beginning of the Civil War, President Lincoln feared that the presence of black troops would alienate states that had remained loyal to the union. Many Union soldiers and civilians doubted black men had the courage or skills to fight.
The Quincy Herald reported dissension among white soldiers “with the arrangement of the president. . .putting Negroes into the field as their equal in all respects as defenders of the flag of our country.” His Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, authorizing black soldiers, President Lincoln took up such complaints. In a letter to a Union rally in Springfield on September 3, 1863, Lincoln wrote, “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you, but no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union.”
Black troops
like Lewis Martin found unequal treatment in the military. Whites were paid $13 a month, blacks received $10, $3 of which could be in clothing. They were denied bounties white soldiers received for recruiting others into the military. The few blacks who were commissioned officers could not rise above the rank of major. They could not be buried in Soldiers’ Cemetery, today’s Arlington National Cemetery, and were denied military honors.
Lewis Martin was among the 600 men of the First Illinois, which became the 29th Infantry, U.S. Colored Troops, when federalized in Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1864. He was with the 29th as part of Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant’s Petersburg-Richmond campaign in 1864-1865. At the Battle of the Crater near Petersburg on July 30, 1864, Martin was severely wounded when he and his comrades charged Confederate works there. He was discharged a disabled veteran on December 6, 1865. Nothing but a marriage certificate is known of his wedding to Mary Jones in Madison County on October 6, 1869.
Martin’s sacrifice was disregarded when he died. Springfield newspapers reported that exposure and alcoholism caused his death. For 121 years his body lay in an unmarked grave in the pauper’s section of Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. On November 2, 2013, a headstone was placed over Martin’s grave, just north of the tomb of the 16th president. Martin is remembered in Dr. Bontecou’s picture of the amputee. It is carved into a marble plaque honoring the soldier in the state’s lone black regiment organized in Quincy in 1863.
Sources:
“29th Regiment, United States Colored Troops” at www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UUS0029RI00C
“29th U.S. Colored Infantry” at https://www.slavetosoldier.org/us-colored-troop-veterans/infantry-regiments/29th-us-colored-infantry
Ankrom Reg, “Quincy organized black regiment for Civil War,” Herald-Whig, February 21, 2014.
Barnes James J. and Patience P. Barnes, “Was Governor Richard Yates Intimidated by the
Copperheads During the Civil War?” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 102, Nos. 3-4, 2014, 337.
“Black Civil War Soldiers with Injuries, Chronic Conditions, and Disabilities” at
“Black Life in Antebellum Illinois” at https//coloredconventions.org/black-illinois-
organizing/black-life/slavery-racist-laws-illinois/
“Died from Exposure and Drink: Louis Martin, a Colored Man Dies Alone,” Illinois State
Register, January 27, 1892.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/24589557/lewis-martin
“Illinois Black Law (1853),” Illinois Secretary of State at
https//www.ilsos.gov/departments/archives/online_exhibits/100_documents/1853-black-law.html#:~:text=Illinois%20Black%20Law%20(1853)&text=Black%20Laws%20restricted%20African-American,Americans%20from%20moving%20to%20Illinois
Kennedy Joseph C.G., Preliminary Report of the Eighth Census, 1860. (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1862), 130-131.
“Lewis Martin, 29th U.S. Colored Troops” at https://sangamoncountyhistory.org/wp/?p=7241
Lincoln to James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,
Vol 4, ed. Roy P Basler. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 409.
Memorial for Pvt. Lewis Martin, 29th Infantry, USCT: Nov. 2, 2013, Springfield, IL” at
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/memorial-for-pvt-lewis-martin-29th-infantry-usct-nov-2-2013-springfield-il.90991/
Miller Edward Jr., The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-Ninth U.S.
Colored Infantry. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 11.
“Negro Regiment in Quincy.” Quincy Herald, September 14, 1863, 1.
“They Were Men Who Suffered and Died” at www.usctchronicle.blogspot.com/2011/01/they-
were-men-who-sufffered-and-died.html/
“United States Colored Troops” at https://encyclopediavirginia.org
“Will Black Soldiers Fight?” Quincy Whig and Republican, September 19, 1863, 1.
