This photograph of fifteen members of the 107th U.S. Colored Infantry at Fort Corcoran in northern Virginia, each one armed with a rifle, might very well have unsettled many white viewers at the time it was taken. Civil War casualties were high, totaling some 620,000; that figure, if it were extrapolated to the U.S. population in the 2020s, would amount to about six million dead. As the war ground on, both sides in the conflict found themselves starved for troops, although the problem was more pressing in the less populous South than it was in the North. The question then arose whether “colored” men should be allowed to fight. Eventually, they were.