As Confederate forces abandoned Charleston near the end of the Civil War, the first Union troops to enter the city included the Twenty-first United States Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.), followed by two companies of the renowned Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers. Their entry symbolized a powerful moment of liberation, as Black soldiers—many of whom had once been enslaved—marched into a city that had been a central hub of the Confederacy and the transatlantic slave trade.
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