USCT

 Colored Troops of the United States

It's been a few years since I last saw Ken Burns' Civil War. I am five episodes in and that's the episode featuring Gettysburg, Vicksburg and the fight along the Chickamauga River in Tennessee and Georgia. U.S. Grant, after surrounding and capturing Vicksburg,  came up the Mississippi River to push back the Confederates along the Chickamauga. When I first saw this part of the nine part series circa 1999, it all seemed amorphous and bloody. It is still bloody and a little less amorphous because I know at least two people who were in Tennessee circa 1863.

I think I have pin pointed the battle that the family lost James Edward Goins of the United States Colored Troops 17th Regiment Company C. His regiment mustered out June 1865 and he wasn't there. He died according to his pension file at the Wilson Hospital in December of 1863. I wonder what the family thought, felt and said; especially since his brother Walker who was in Tennessee at the same time? Walker returned to his wife Mary Jackson, who he married in 1859, in Barnesville, Ohio.