The 26th US Colored Troops regiment was formed in New York in February 1864 by the Union League Club of New York. This was one of three (USCT) regiments formed by that State and counted toward New York’s quota of troops required by Lincoln. Most if not all the colored men in the 26th Regiment were obtained in the South.
No Quarter Ordered
“On July 14, 1864, Gen. B.H. Robertson reported from John’s Island to the Confederate commander at Charleston, informing him that after a skirmish with the enemy, “Negro prisoners asserted that Col. William Silliman, commanding Twenty-sixth Regiment, US Colored Troops, in the presence of Brig-Gen. Rufus Saxton (who has always commanded Negroes), gave orders to show “no quarter.”
Gen. Robertson further said that Private Cooper, of Co. B., Second South Carolina Cavalry, had fallen into the hands of the enemy after being wounded; but that after the ground had been recovered and Cooper liberated, he was found bayoneted “in six or seven different places.”
(The South’s Burden- The Curse of Sectionalism in the United States. Benjamin Franklin Grady, Nash Brothers, 1906, pg 86)