Port Royal’s New Year’s Day ceremony marked the Union’s first black regiment

Evidence

The Colonel was not alone in his feeling that after the disgrace of Bull Run, the Union needed to take Port Royal Island, and after the slaughter at Fredericksburg, Port Royal needed this convocation. White women in bonnets and white men in vests crowd the platform. The Colonel studies the 1st South Carolina Volunteers arrayed before him. It is the first black unit. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 744

Categorization

• XREF: The Port Royal event is the famous setting for Charlotte Forten’s diary and the ‘First South Carolina Volunteers’ — relevant to the reader’s interest in concrete empirical anchors of the reframing narrative.