The United Sons & Daughters of Freedmen honor our Freedmen Patriot Saints who fought valiantly for this country and who have showed bravery against odds not seen in many modern civilizations. We take the time to not only honor, but introduce to many of you for the first time, the great and Noble American Freedmen heroes who fought in the Civil War or trained the men who did so.
Moses Dickson
1824 – 1901Moses Dickson was an abolitionist, soldier, minister, and founder of possibly the first independent Freedmen Secret Society in the United States. Dickson would form the Knights of Liberty, an anti-slavery organization that planned a slave uprising in the United States. The Knights of Liberty were also instrumental in helping escaped slaves reach freedom through the Underground Railroad. Dickson claimed to have trained 47,240 men who would fight in the Civil War. He also founded a Freedmen self-help organization, The International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor, and was a co-founder of Lincoln University in Missouri.
Prince Rivers
1824 – 1887Prince Rivers is arguably one of the greatest Freedmen to ever live. Prince R. Rivers was a Freedman, once enslaved in South Carolina, who served as a soldier in the Union Army and as a state politician during the Reconstruction era. He escaped from slavery and joined Union lines, becoming a sergeant in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a Union regiment in the American Civil War. He had gained literacy as an enslaved man and after the war joined the Republican Party. He served as a delegate to the 1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention, becoming known as an orator. He was one of three American Freedmen founders of Aiken County, SC in 1871, helped pick the site for the courthouse, and served as the state legislator from the county through 1874.
Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Boston abolitionist, chose Rivers to head his Company A. Higginson once reported:
"There is not a white officer in this regiment who has more administrative ability, or more absolute authority over the men. They do not love him, but his mere presence has controlling power over them." — Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Higginson also described Rivers as a man of indefinable magnetism:
"He writes well enough to prepare for me a daily report of his duties in the camp; if his education reached a higher point, I see no reason why he should not command the Army of the Potomac. He is jet-black... his complexion, like that of others of my darkest men, having a sort of rich, clear depth, without a trace of sootiness, and to my eye, very handsome. His features are tolerably regular, and full of command, and his figure superior to that of any of our white officers — being six feet high, perfectly proportioned, and of apparently inexhaustible strength and activity. His gait is like a panther's; I never saw such a tread. No anti-slavery novel has described a man of such marked ability. If there would ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king." — Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Robert Smalls
1839 – 1915Few Freedmen have as heroic an account as Robert Smalls. His acts of bravery should be commended and canonized in memoriam.
Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow enslaved men — in the absence of the white captain and his two mates — slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain and even donning the captain's wide-brimmed straw hat to hide his face, responded with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself. Cleared, Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered the ship to the blockading Union fleet.
In fewer than four hours, Robert Smalls had done something unimaginable: in the midst of the Civil War, this Black man — a slave — had commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship and delivered its 17 Black passengers (nine men, five women, and three children) from slavery to freedom.
Martin Delany
1812 – 1885Martin Robison Delany was an abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier, and writer — and arguably the first proponent of Black nationalism. Delany is credited with the Pan-African slogan "Africa for Africans." When the United States Colored Troops were created in 1863, he recruited for them. Commissioned as a major in February 1865, Delany became the first African-American field grade officer in the United States Army.
After the Civil War, Delany went south, settling in South Carolina, where he worked for the Freedmen's Bureau and became politically active in the Colored Conventions Movement.