The Unknown African American Soldier: the Battle's first casualty
Since the beginning of the war, African American slaves had placed a tentative hope freedom would be the reward for service to the Union side. This was confirmed in the First Confiscation Act of 1861, which stated that Confederates who used their slaves in the construction of Confederate military equipment forfeited said slaves. This was followed up with the Second Confiscation Act of 1862, which proclaimed any slave who presented themselves at a Union garrison as free. It passed on the same day as the Militia Act, which confirmed that "persons of African descent" would be accepted into the Union military, specifically for non-combat roles. By the end of the war, however, there were well over two hundred regiments of African American soldiers.
Most accounts of the Battle of Fayette agree: Anderson's bushwackers, clad in Union blue, were undetected until one of their number shot an African American man in a Federal uniform-- killing him, in some version. Who was the man first shot by Anderson's group?
Sadly, he remains unknown. We have no knowledge of his name, how he was attached to the 9th Cavalry of the Missouri State Militia. It is unclear if he even died or was wounded by Anderson's men, as Watts's of the Battle of Fayette list only one dead Union soldier, "a man by the name of Benton."
In the 1883 "History of Howard and Chariton Counties, Missouri," a "List of Colored Recruits from Howard County" is provided for the consideration of "the former owners of slaves, and their descendants in Howard county" (not, tellingly, the families and descendants of those slaves). Perhaps the first man shot at in the Battle of Fayette is named here.