Fort Scott National Historic Site

In the 1840s officers at Fort Scott brought enslaved people with them to the post. In the 1850s the town that grew up in its empty buildings leaned proslavery. Within a few years the same ground became one of the first places in the country where formerly enslaved men were armed for the Union.

In August 1862 Senator James Lane began raising the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry without federal approval, enlisting free Black men and men who had escaped slavery in Missouri. That October about 225 of them drove off some 500 Confederates at Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri, the first combat for Black soldiers in the war; ten of the regiment were killed. At an Emancipation celebration at Fort Scott on January 1, 1863, Captain William D. Mathews, a free Black man who had worked on the Underground Railroad, told the troops, "Now is our time to strike." On January 13 the regiment was mustered into federal service on the fort's old parade ground. The 2nd Kansas Colored was mustered there too.

Federal service was not equal service. Black soldiers were paid $10 a month to white soldiers' $13, and Mathews lost his captaincy when the regiment was federalized. At Poison Springs, Arkansas, on April 18, 1864, the regiment lost 117 killed and 65 wounded, a toll made worse because Confederates executed captured and wounded men. "Remember Poison Springs" became a battle cry. The site keeps 20 historic structures around the parade ground and five acres of restored tallgrass prairie.