1864

For generations, American soldiers and sailors dressed and posed in their finest have sent photographs of themselves back home to their mothers, wives or girlfriends. These two Union soldiers were no different. Seen in this 1864 image, taken by Leeson’s Photographic Gallery at 167 Poydras St. in New Orleans, are Sergeant Major William. L. Henderson and Hospital Steward Thomas H. Sands Pennington, both are members of the 20th United States Colored Troop Infantry Regiment, one of several Federal military commands occupying an uneasy and at times resistant New Orleans after the city fell to Union forces on May 1, 1862. 

During the Civil War, both the North and South created African-American units to fill their ranks. In Louisiana, it was the Native Guard, a unit of free men of color who volunteered to serve in the Confederate army but later joined the Union army after the city fell. By the end of the war, almost 180,000 Black soldiers had fought in the Union Army. One of those units was the 20th U.S. Colored Troop Infantry Regiment, organized on Feb. 9, 1864, at Rikers Island, New York. A month after its creation, the War Department ordered the regiment to the Department of the Gulf. It arrived in New Orleans on March 20. The first few months, the regiment moved from New Orleans to Port Hudson on the Mississippi north of Baton Rouge and then to Texas, before returning to Louisiana for a brief stay in Plaquemine, La. The regiment returned to the New Orleans area in August 1864 where it remained until June 1865. Its next post was Nashville, Tenn. The regiment disbanded on Oct. 7, 1865. According to reports, the 20th Regiment lost 285 men. Most died from diseases rather than hostile fire. Only one soldier, an enlisted man, died from wounds received in battle.

As to the two soldiers seen here, little information is available about Sgt. Major Henderson. More is known about Pennington, the adopted son of an escaped slave and Black abolitionist preacher from Albany, New York. The young Pennington studied pharmacy under Thomas Elkins a New York State member of the Vigilance Committee of the Underground Railroad. After the war, Pennington worked briefly for a druggist in New York City, married Elkins’ niece, and returned to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where he went on to build a highly regarded career in pharmacy. He died in 1900.