Efforts are underway to pinpoint and possibly excavate an important Civil War site in Detroit, where a regiment of Black Union soldiers from Michigan and Canada trained before going to battle.
Camp Ward was located on Detroit’s near east side, in the city’s Lafayette Park neighborhood. A state historic marker exists near the location, but it wasn’t entirely clear where the site, a former farm, was located.
Until last summer. That’s when researchers from the Michigan Underground Railroad Exploratory Collective, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and the University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropological Archaeology found remains of the site using ground-penetrating radar.
Nubia Wardford Polk, director of archeology for the Camp Ward project, said the scan revealed “very, very clear” images of the site. “It was unbelievably clear,” she said. “It was almost like looking at photographs.”
Wardford Polk said the scans also revealed other markers of settlements from Detroit’s past — including the former Black Bottom neighborhood, and indications of French and British colonial settlements. All of these artifacts were found within a four-foot layer beneath the surface.
Camp Ward was the training ground for Michigan’s Black Civil War regiment, initially known as the First Michigan Colored Regiment and later as the 102nd U.S. Colored Troops. Conditions there were “deplorable” and reflected the discrimination and often inferior conditions Black soldiers faced, said Barbara K. Smith, co-founder and executive director of MUREC.
Nonetheless, the regiment attracted Black men from across southern Michigan and even eastern Canada, Smith said. Some 11,000 former slaves who had escaped to safety in that country returned to fight on the Union’s behalf.
“They wanted to go back and fight, I guess, for their loved ones who were still in bondage and being oppressed,” Smith said. “And that just warms my heart for them to make that sacrifice.”
Smith said Black soldiers faced especially grave risks in going to battle. Black troops caught by Confederate forces often faced re-enslavement or execution. That was in addition to being given particularly undesirable assignments, receiving less pay than white soldiers, and being denied military honors for valor.
Nonetheless, the regiment’s “bravery was shown on multiple occasions,” according to the Detroit Historical Society. Mustered out of Detroit in February 1864, the regiment was sent deep into the South, spending most of the remainder of the war in South Carolina. They were sent on several expeditions behind Confederate lines, tearing up railroads and other infrastructure. The 102nd participated in several battles and “defeated the Confederate forces in every skirmish,” the historical society (which is not affiliated with the Camp Ward project) says.
The regiment returned to Detroit from South Carolina in October 1865. There, "they were received in about the same manner as a white regiment,” according to a Detroit Free Press report from that time. That newspaper, which had initially opposed the formation of a Black Michigan regiment and often sought to stoke the flames of racial bigotry, also noted that “The Colored troops fought nobly.”
Wardford Polk said the Camp Ward project is still in its initial stages. She said the ultimate hope is to excavate at least part of the site and turn it into an educational attraction — an aim for which they’re seeking both donations, and ultimately permission from landowners to dig on their properties.
But Wardford Polk said there’s another objective, and it has to do with changing the larger historical narrative.
“These men were freedom fighters,” she said. “I just think it's just an important thing for everybody, not only African Americans [to know]. I would like our history to become seen as part of the whole historical scheme, instead of an aside.”
Editor's note: An initial version of this story did not mention the University of Michigan as one of the Camp Ward Project's partners. That information has been corrected above. The University of Michigan holds Michigan Public's broadcast license.
