Most businesses and government operations in Colusa County were in full operation on Monday, the official observance of Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. Federal offices were closed.
A blend of the words June and nineteenth, the federal holiday marks June 19, 1865, the day Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and issued the order proclaiming that all enslaved African Americans were free.
President Abraham Lincoln had actually issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of the Civil War, but the news, during wartime, took time to travel everywhere.
Before Texas got belated news of the end of slavery, two months after the war had ended, many African Americans had already earned their right to U.S. citizenship by serving the Union Army during the war or enlisting their services to the war effort after freedom for all slaves was declared.
Cpl. Thomas Jefferson Lowe, late of Colusa County, served in Company D, 137th United States Colored Infantry.
Lowe was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 8, 1842, and died in the Colusa Hospital on April 23, 1941, at the age of 99.
The 137th was organized at Selma, Ala. just one day before the Civil War was declared over but its soldiers performed duties in Georgia until mustered out Jan. 16, 1866.
“He (Lowe) is the last Union Civil War veteran to pass away in Colusa County,” said Historical Researcher John Morton. “He is buried in the Grand Island Cemetery.”
Morton said Lowe’s military headstone had already been ordered prior to the Juneteenth observance and will be placed on his grave to honor his service to this country when it is received.
According to the National Archives, 179,000 black men (10 percent of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war (most from infection or disease). Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry, but most performed non-combat support functions that sustain an army. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons, and teamsters also contributed to the war cause. There were nearly 80 black commissioned officers. Black women, who could not formally join the Army, nonetheless served as nurses, spies, and scouts, the most famous being Harriet Tubman, who scouted for the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers.
Cpl. Marshall Glasscock, Company C, 70th United States Colored Infantry, served in one of four companies organized at Natchez, Miss. from April 23 to Oct. 1, 1864, and consolidated with the 71st U. S. Colored Infantry until mustered out March 7, 1866.
Glasscock was born in Virginia, a slave state, in 1844. He died in Colusa on Oct. 18, 1871 and is buried in the Colusa Cemetery.
While black units were not used in combat as extensively as they might have been, the soldiers served with distinction in a number of battles, according to the National Archives.
Black infantrymen reportedly fought gallantly at Milliken’s Bend, La.; Port Hudson, La.; Petersburg, Tenn.; and Nashville, Tenn. In the July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, S.C., the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers lost two-thirds of their officers and half of their troops.
Their sacrifice is memorably dramatized in the film “Glory,” which played on multiple television outlets over the Juneteenth weekend.
By war’s end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor for their valor. ■