Henry Sink: Settler, Soldier, Citizen
WHEN AN AGED AND AILING Henry Sink left De Pere for the Wisconsin Veterans Home at King, Wisconsin, in 1904, the Brown County Democrat noted the departure of the well-known African American resident and his wife: “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sink left Tuesday for Waupaca, where Mr. Sink will enter the Soldiers’ home hospital. His condition has been serious for some time.”
Sink’s residence in northeast Wisconsin had begun decades earlier. Born into slavery in Batesville, Arkansas, in the 1830s, he moved with his young family to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in the early 1860s. Though the history of African American settlement in nineteenth-century northeast Wisconsin is largely forgotten today, Sink was one individual in the region’s small but steadily growing African American population during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Henry Sink first emerges in the local historical record in June 1863, when his name appears on the list of draft-eligible men in Rosendale, Fond du Lac County. In April 1864, he enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth Regiment of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) to fight in the Civil War. At that time, Sink lived in Fond du Lac with his wife, Mary, and son, Charles. Charles’s 1859 birth in Arkansas, the draft register, and the family’s 1864 residence in Fond du Lac establish the window for their arrival.
Though their route to Wisconsin is not known, the Sinks may have been “contrabands,” formerly enslaved people who during the Civil War made their way to freedom behind Union lines. In October 1862, approximately seventy-five African Americans moved from the contraband camp at Cairo, Illinois, to Fond du Lac at the suggestion of Rev. James Rogers, the chaplain of the Fourteenth Wisconsin and formerly a minister in Fond du Lac.
Sink was one of many formerly enslaved men to join the Union Army. Though President Lincoln had initially rejected allowing African Americans to serve as soldiers, he began to rethink this position in the summer of 1862, and growing numbers of black troops joined the fight that fall. Signed by Lincoln on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation made national policy of the recruitment of freed and formerly enslaved men. In the last two years of the Civil War, approximately 185,000 African Americans served in the Union army and navy.
The Twenty-Ninth Regiment was organized in Illinois beginning in late 1863. Volunteers trained at Quincy, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from the slaveholding state of Missouri. The first six companies of the Twenty-Ninth included many men who were enslaved until they crossed the river to volunteer for the army. Wisconsin did not form a USCT regiment because of its small black population. However, state officials knew men from the state were joining the Twenty-Ninth. In March 1864, Wisconsin began its own recruitment of African Americans. All volunteers from March through late June, including Henry Sink, were assigned to Company F of the Twenty-Ninth USCT and went to Quincy for training.
Wisconsin Civil War histories seldom mention African American soldiers. Various sources count between 155 and 353 black men credited to Wisconsin but say little more. Some emphasize that a majority of these men never set foot in the state, making their numbers seem even more inconsequential. In reality, twenty-two men in Henry Sink’s Company F were Wisconsin residents when they enlisted. At least twenty-six other men who lived in Wisconsin before or after the war served in other companies of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment, and many more served in other USCT regiments, including the most famous African American regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. Others joined white Wisconsin regiments.
The Twenty-Ninth’s Company F was mustered in on July 8, 1864, with Captain Willard Daggett of Milwaukee in command.
