Mary Lee Brady, Ph.D.

Charles Hemings Trotter was apparently one of the 170,000 young men in the 17 to 40 year old age group who joined one of the approximately 150 U.S. Army Colored Troop Regiments planned and established between July 1862 when first announced by President Lincoln to his cabinet, ... and war's end beyond Appomattox in April 1865 and into June 1865 when rebels in Texas were finally subdued.  Empowered Whites had planned, programmed and executed for at least ten generations (1620-1860) the godless rationale of Black inferiority to serve interests of White superiors, ... but in doing so the light of Christ shone through darkness enough to generate a generation of gifted and talented ten percent to believe joining Union Army was goodness for themselves and others.

Explain it any other way and the fact remains that never did so many (including ancestors of Clarence Thomas) owe so much to so few most never knew or believed in even unto this day.  Thomas still believes he is free as a result of the 13th constitutional amendment, not events that made it possible.  He is one of our favorite examples about the nature of empowerment given to African-Americans unable to comprehend the totality of it to help others. 

Young men had the power to enlist or run away to Canada where it was cold but safe; or stay enslaved on a slave plantation and live without being a free man or woman. Still others joined enemies of human liberty. Columnist Roland Barksdale Hall, a young writer, in his book entitled "Healing Is The Children's Bread" offers other writers, especially novelists, ... insight into the mindset of ancestors such as those of Clarence Thomas who were of age to join Union forces seeking to set them free or give their loyalty and even lives to people knowingly to keep them slaves. 

There is no doubt in our mind that if the body and spirit of Clarence Thomas had by some fluke of the imagination, been placed on the Supreme Court after 1865-1866, ... he would have sided with decidedly cold hearted Roman logic of Justice Antonin Scalia that 13th and 14th amendments to U.S. Constitution granting African-Americans citizenship were illegal because majority of  former rebel states had not been readmitted for Union to ratify it.  Yes, many judges and men of property said so at the time but lacked the power to stop us from being classified as full citizens!  And, before the war was ended the same dark voices had proclaimed that President Abraham Lincoln did not have constitutional power to free the slaves without a constitutional amendment approved by all states including those who held them in bondage via their states constitutions. 

A lot of young men who enlisted in the victorious Union forces did so using the surname of "Trotter" and many died during and after the war when ex-confederate veterans sought to kill and/or drive Black patriots out of the former rebel states. 

It is not known whether Charles Trotter was one of the 40,000 killed in the fighting or ever saw his siblings, cousins, uncles again.  The possibility exists that he may have been among the Colored Troop Regiments stationed in the occupied former rebel states until 1876 when removed by President Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 19th President of the United States.  Hayes election as President was deadlocked in the House of Representatives and had promised to end reconstruction and remove the Union troops from the beaten south in exchange for election support by White Democrats recently readmitted to Congress from the former rebel states. 

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