Memorial for Connecticut Colored Civil War Soldiers

Research
Written By John Mills

29th Connecticut Colored Regiment while in Beaufort, South Carolina - Library of Congress

29th Connecticut Colored Regiment Memorial in New Haven, CT

Wondering if there are any Connecticut Historians out there that can help me with this question.

So, the Connecticut State Library has a page that lists all people who enlisted in the Connecticut 29th Colored Regiment, the Connecticut 30th Colored Regiment and the New York 31st Colored Regiment. You can see that at https://www.ctatatelibrarydata.org/colored-troop-enlistments-from-connecticut-during-the-civil-war/

As I understand it, 1,647 colored people enlisted in the 29th regiment, which was raised in Fair Haven, Connecticut and mustered on March 8th, 1864. Since that was more than was anticipated for a single regiment, 407 of those individuals were split into a new regiment...the 30th, which also mustered in March of 1864, leaving the 29th with 1,240 soldiers.

The 31st regiment is said to have been raised in April 1864 on Hart Island in New York, although all 52 soldiers enlisted in Connecticut.

On May 18th, 1864, the 30th merged into the 31st regiment...so now the 31st had 459 people, all of whom enlisted in Connecticut, but were now in a regiment which was considered a New York regiment.

So the questions I have are:

  1. Why does the 29th Colored Regiment memorial in New Haven only have 900 names on the walls? According to the records at the State Library, the monument is missing 340 people who were in the 29th Regiment.

  2. Why are we not also memorializing the 30th and/or 31st Colored regiment? Those regiments contain an additional 459 people, all of whom enlisted in Connecticut! Is there a Connecticut memorial for them I don't know about?

  3. If there is no other Connecticut memorial, that would mean there are nearly 800 Colored people who are not memorialized in Connecticut...nearly half of those that enlisted in one of these 3 regiments while in Connecticut. Should something be done about that?

Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

John Mills

Originally from San Diego, John Mills is a technologist by trade, but an equity advocate and independent scholar by passion. The descendant of both southern and northern enslaved, John focuses on unearthing little known people and stories of this country’s history in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. John presents research through the lens and perspective of a descendant, with intent to inspire understanding and empathy, a means to inspire good, God fearing people, now armed with information, to look into whether they may be unwittingly aligning to biases resulting from the reverberating effects of a past time. John is a member of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum Council. John is also working with an international team funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in an effort to deliver transformational impact on digital methods in cultural institutions...a means to decolonize museums. Finally, John is working with the state of Connecticut, business leaders and scholars in Middletown, CT to honor and memorialize a former enslaved individual by the name of Prince Mortimer.

https://alexbreanne.org
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