Alexander Thomas Augusta
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch April 29, 1863:
“Nigger” Surgeons.
–The recently appointed negro surgeon, Dr. A. S. Augusta, writes to the Washington Star that he holds the appointment of full regimental surgeon U. S. V. instead of assistant surgeon, as heretofore stated.
Alexander Thomas Augusta was born free in Norfolk in 1825. He was determined to become a doctor but was blocked at medical schools in the United States because of his race. He earned a medical degree from Trinity College at the University of Toronto in 1856. He returned to Baltimore in 1861.
Augusta went to Washington, D.C., wrote Abraham Lincoln offering his services as a surgeon and was given a Presidential commission in the Union Army in October 1862. On April 4, 1863, he received a major’s commission as surgeon for African-American troops. This made him the United States Army’s first African-American physician out of eight in the Union Army and its highest-ranking African-American officer at the time. Some whites disapproved of him having such a high rank and as such he was mobbed in Baltimore during May 1863 (where three people were arrested for assault) and in Washington for publicly wearing his officer’s uniform On October 2, 1863 he was commissioned Regimental Surgeon of the Seventh U.S. Colored Troops.
Dr. Augusta was the only African-American on the faculty of the medical school at Howard University when it opened in 1868. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, where “Augusta’s grave, set apart from the rows of white headstones, identifies him as “the commissioned surgeon of colored volunteers.”
