Which was nearly 10% of the Union Army.
Add to those at least 10,000 (16%) serving in the Union Navy.
The death rate from all causes among the Union's two million troops was about 15%.
Among its colored troops deaths were just over 20%.
Colored troops did fight some notable battles, and 18 won the Medal of Honor.
SunkenCiv: "...black soldiers served (or well after the war, purported to have served) for some of the CSA states’ forces."
Well, many tens of thousands of slaves also served the Confederate Army, in a wide variety of infrastructure roles, from building roads & fortifications to miners, teamsters, nurses aids, setting up & maintaining camps, etc., etc.
Civil War historian Allen Guelzo estimates that Lee's Army at Gettysburg, in addition to 75,000 Confederate soldiers included another 30,000 slaves.
Yes, there are scattered reports of slaves serving in combat, but all suggestions for making slaves into Confederate fighting soldiers were squelched until the final days of the war.
No black units ever fought for the Confederacy.
I wasn’t disagreeing that black troops went into combat, only pointing out that by and large, they didn’t serve in combat roles.
I would add that, when they did, the KIA rates were appalling, as they were for everyone who served in that war. Combat KIA for soldiers was about 1.5% (I’d guess that’s a little higher, depending on how one counts outcomes in field hospitals and such), north and south, I’d be surprised if black KIA wasn’t at least a bit higher, because the CSA forces didn’t generally take black soldiers prisoners, preferring to kill them in the field.
I didn’t and still don’t count black slave labor as serving in the Confederate army, any more than “contraband of war” captured slaves who worked on the Capitol dome were serving in the Union army. Captured slaves held by the Union army were basically 100 percent captured from masters living in the Confederacy, which further sapped what passed for a labor force in the South.
The North also had a huge advantage in industry, and built a mostly overwhelming naval advantage. A surprising number of immigrants stormed ashore during the war years, and I’d be surprised if fewer than 90 percent arrived in the Union. Large numbers served as substitutes during the first couple of years, after that black enlistments enlarged to fill the gap between northern native-born whites who didn’t want to serve (in this particular rural area, a very large percentage appears to have signed up in 1861); I’d be a little surprised if the falloff in the substitutes’ numbers in the face of little tet-a-tets like Antietam didn’t factor into the decision to allow recruitment of black troops.