In the Civil War, blacks struggled for the right to bear arms. They endured pay discrimination, inferior equipment and medical treatment along with dangerous military assignments. Few Civil War letters, diaries, photographs, poetry or music from the black experience survive. Gospel songs preserve little of the deep religious conviction that sustained slave and African American soldier alike. Even today, the story of USCT is mostly omitted from the pages of United States history. African America's fight for freedom during the Civil War, the stuff of music, literature, and film, remains largely missing from their own heritage and that of the entire nation.