However, this did not change their answer or how they saw themselves. These men were enslaved, farming the land owned by someone else or laboring in the house of their enslaver. There is also a field that notes the recruit’s occupation, with most of them listed as “farmer” or “laborer”. What makes these records especially powerful is that they include a physical description of the man enlisting - his height, skin color, hair color, and eye color. Louis County Library Genealogy Department, we were able to track down the descriptive records for 67 Black men who enlisted at the Liberty Recruitment Station of the Union Army. Thanks to the preservation of military records by the National Archives (hosted on Fold3) and the St. These questions led to the unexpected project of researching Civil War records in the hope of finding the names of all the Black men from Liberty who served. This discovery brought up many questions about Black men serving in the Civil War: How many men from Liberty enlisted? How did enslaved men come to be enlisted in the army of the Union? What happened to them after the war? Are any of them buried in unmarked graves like David Drake? While researching the names for the Legacy Memorial, we came across the Union enlistment records of David Drake (Blue), who is believed to be buried in Fairview Cemetery.
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