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A Kansas memorial lists 15 Black soldiers killed during the Civil War.Their lives are a mystery.| Kansas Press Association.A Kansas memorial lists 15 Black soldiers killed during the Civil War.Their lives are a mystery.This memorial at Fort Scott National Cemetery commemorates the 15 Black soldiers killed in May 1863 near Sherwood, Missouri.(Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector) FORT SCOTT — At the national cemetery there is peace.There is no news to report, no current affairs to parse, no urgent interview requests awaiting any of the 8,000 inhabitants.All the battles have been fought, the costs tallied, the names and the dates etched into marble stones 13 inches wide and 4 inches thick.The stones stand in regimented rows across the cemetery’s 28 acres of rolling hills.On this afternoon in May, the scudded sky seems particularly broad and the hills unusually green.The only sound is the wind whispering through the trees and animating the flag at half-staff on the cemetery’s highest point.Officially designated as National Cemetery No.1 and established Nov.15, 1862, it was the first among the 14 cemeteries designated by Abraham Lincoln to accommodate the grim harvest of the Civil War.Like many other national cemeteries, including the one at Gettysburg, the Fort Scott site is administered by the U.S.Department of Veterans Affairs.The first military burials were of those who died of accident or disease at the federal military post that gave this town in southeastern Kansas its name.In addition to the fort, there was also a two-story military prison here, so some of the early occupants were Confederates who died as prisoners.It wasn’t a national cemetery to begin with, but the “Presbyterian Graveyard” at the edge of town, and the first graves were marked with wooden boards and stakes, according to its National Register of Historic Places registration.Only a few hundred of those interred here died in combat, as the vast majority of plots are those of veterans and their spouses, from the Civil War era to the present day.The most famous grave, if there can be fame in death, is not marked by a flat white standing stone, but by a red sandstone boulder.The boulder marks the grave of Eugene F.Ware, a name most Kansans won’t know today.His wife, Jeannette, is buried with him.Ware was an officer in an Iowa cavalry regiment who, in 1864, participated in the “Indian War” with the plains nations across the West.He settled in Kansas in 1867 and pursued a number of occupations: farmer, saddle shop proprietor, and editor of the Fort Scott Monitor.He joined a law practice after being admitted to the bar and was later elected to the Kansas Senate.He wrote books about water rights law and military history.But Ware was most famous as a poet.Under the pseudonym “Ironquill,” Ware turned out popular verse that relied on easy rhymes and heavy sentimentality.An early poem, and considered by many his best, was “The Washerwoman’s Song,” in which an agnostic narrator watches with some longing while a working woman scrubs clothes while singing a consoling hymn.Ware died in 1911.The sandstone boulder has been so robbed of significance by the passage of time and taste that it now seems as cryptic as the ruins in “Ozymandias.” It is difficult to find any contemporary value in Ware’s work.His racist views about Native Americans, whom he considered inferior to whites, is disturbing, but unsurprising for the time.Some of the cemetery’s original inhabitants are 17 indigenous soldiers from the Civil War.All were refugees who fled Indian Territory to Kansas in 1861 and 1862 and were organized as private soldiers into state home guard units.Most of these 17 died at the post hospital, according to the national register, and little is known about them other than their names — Deer-in-Water, Set-Them-Up — and the maladies that killed them, including pneumonia and typhoid fever.Every individual interred in this country of the dead, whether poet or private, left behind a life written not in stone but in flesh and blood with the sky as witness.The clouds do not pass judgment.All are equal here.But there are 15 names on a stone monument in a shoulder of the cemetery that stand as a testament to the struggle for a living equality.These individuals are not buried here, because their bodies were literally consumed by the fire of war.They were soldiers of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, and they died on a Missouri farm about 60 miles to the southeast.Their story is that of the first Black soldiers to fight in the Civil War.The 1989 Edward Zwick film “Glory” depicts the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, a regiment of Black enlisted men and white officers, and its true-life assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina.That battle took place in July 1863, and the movie has shaped the popular conception of Black troops in the Civil War.But the First Kansas Colored Infantry engaged Confederate forces on Oct.29, 1862, at the Battle of Island Mound in Bates County, Missouri.It was a fight near the Marais des Cygnes River between 240 Kansas soldiers and perhaps 400 pro-slavery guerillas.The Kansans had established a fortified position, called “Fort Africa,” that was assaulted by mounted guerillas, known regionally as “bushwhackers.” The fight, which was more of a skirmish than a battle, resulted in the deaths of eight Kansas soldiers and an unknown number of rebels.It was nearly lost in the historic record, overshadowed by battles involving thousands of troops, but its significance transcends its numbers.Island Mound took place months before any Black units were federalized following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of Jan.The First Kansas Colored were serving as a state guard unit, not yet as part of the regular army.The regiment had been organized by Jim Lane, a U.S.senator from Kansas, a radical Republican, and the “grim chieftain” of Jayhawker irregulars in the years immediately before the war.Lane was not authorized to form a Black regiment, but he did so anyway.Leavenworth was the headquarters for the recruiting effort, but the First Colored Kansas was composed of free men and formerly enslaved individuals from a wide area.In his 2021 book, “Soldiers in the Army of Freedom,” historian Ian Michael Spurgeon recounts that 40% of the men who joined the regiment in 1862 listed Missouri as their place of residence.“They were from Independence, Lexington, Lafayette, Pleasantville, St.Louis, and other cities,” Spurgeon writes.“They came from farms in Clay, Howard, Buchanan, Randolph, Platte, Morgan, Henry, and other counties.After Missouri, most recruits that fall claimed Kentucky as their home state.It is not known how many traveled directly from Kentucky to Kansas on their own or had been brought to Missouri by their owners.” The men who had formerly been enslaved were officially designated as “contraband.” Although the war was being fought to end slavery and preserve the Union, Black recruits were generally regarded with suspicion and even hostility.Some in the regular army were resentful, believing that Black soldiers were inferior and unsuited for combat.Even those who were sympathetic suggested that such units be given supporting roles, such as contributing the hard labor for a telegraph line across eastern Kansas.Even Lane, who was in charge of recruiting, once suggested that every white soldier be assigned a Black servant.But the First Colored Kansas was recruited to fight.In the beginning, they didn’t even have the blue uniforms that were standard for Union troops or reliable weapons with in which to fight.Their uniforms were the older, pre-war gray uniforms, and their weapons were inferior to the Springfield rifles carried by most white soldiers.“By all accounts, the men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry found themselves holding virtually worthless weapons,” Spurgeon writes.The guns were likely cheap imported muskets purchased earlier in the war, and not one in five would discharge reliably.The Black troops received less than half the pay of white s