How Private Murray Became “Private No More”

In 2017 I experienced one of those special moments in a historian's career.That exhilarating moment of realization that the document you are looking at is hundreds of years old and has not been seen in a very long time.I was scrolling through a set of digitized pension records from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) when something in one of the folders caught my eye. 1 Some of the thumbnail images looked di erent than the typical a davits and pension forms I was accustomed to seeing.When I opened one of the les, I noticed that one of them was a handwritten document dated 1864, before the soldier died.I then realized that the document was a letter written by the soldier to his mother.My excitement grew as I scanned through the rest of the pension folder and discovered that there were many other such letters.I had been researching the 102nd United States Colored Troops (USCT) for several years by then and had not yet come across an original letter written by one of the soldiers during the war.Needless to say, everything on my to-do list that day was forgotten as I began trying to read through the letters.The condition of the letters and quality of the handwriting made reading them di cult, so I did not get far that day, but it was enough to know that I had something rare and special.Six years later I was holding a copy of Private No More in my hands.Like Private No More, many of the projects throughout my career developed more by chance than by plan.As a graduate student in the early 1990s I had to scrap my rst dissertation topic about six months into the research.I'll never forget the disheartening moment when I discovered that someone else, a wellrecognized scholar, was much further along in the topic I had chosen, and I would need to go in another direction.The news threatened to sideline my PhD.Then, several weeks later, while sitting on the oor and hoping for inspiration in the collapsible stacks at the University of Bu alo's library, I ran across a brief reference to Buxton, a settlement of fugitive enslaved people and free