Stephen Atkins Swails

Who was Stephen Atkins Swails?

Stephen Atkins Swails was a soldier in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Although originally enlisting as a private, he may have been the first African-American soldier promoted to officer rank in that conflict, as evidenced by the U.S. War Department's initial refusal of that promotion due to his "...African descent."

Swails was a free black who was so light in coloring that he was often mistaken as white. He was married and employed mostly as a waiter in Cooperstown, New York at the start of the Civil War. However, his enlistment papers state he was employed as a boatman in Elmira, New York when he joined the army. In 1863, he answered Frederick Douglass' call to arms and joined the 54th Massachusetts when it began forming, and served in that regiment, eventually being commissioned as an officer, until the end of the war. After the war, he settled in South Carolina and later Washington, D.C., becoming a lawyer and politician.