The US Colored Troops Pension Files: Unlocking Hidden Histories with the Archives of Reconstruction

The US Colored Troops Pension Files: Unlocking Hidden Histories

What stories are buried in 150-year-old pension applications? More than military records, these files reveal marriage certificates, photos, and family testimonies - traces of African American life after the Civil War. In this episode, scholars from USC Beaufort’s Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era share how the First South Project is using these archives to rewrite American history.

What if your family’s story, hidden in centuries-old documents, could reshape how America understands freedom, sacrifice, and belonging? This episode explores that question through the groundbreaking work of faculty at the Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era (ISRE) at USC Beaufort.

At the center of this conversation are the United States Colored Troops (USCT) pension applications. More than military records, these files are living archives. They hold marriage certificates, death certificates, affidavits, even rare photographs—evidence that not only secured pensions for widows and children but also preserved deeply personal chapters of African American life after the Civil War.

These records are now shaping the ISRE’s First South Project, a pathbreaking effort to re-center these records in American history.

👉 Join the conversation online and help us unlock the history written in these extraordinary archives. 💼