Christian Fleetwood Papers

Explore the papers of soldier and civic leader Christian Fleetwood, documenting his military career as a Union soldier during the Civil War and his activities as a leading African American citizen of Washington, D.C. The collection also includes documents of his wife Sara Iredell Fleetwood and other family members, and photographs, most of which include handwritten notes on their reverse.

Christian Abraham Fleetwood (1840-1914) was born in Baltimore to a free African American family in the household of sugar merchant, John C. Brune. Prior to the Civil War, he graduated from the Ashmun Institute, traveled to Liberia and Sierra Leone with the Maryland Colonization Society, and co-founded Baltimore’s Lyceum Observer, one of the first African American newspapers in the border slave states.

Fleetwood enlisted in the 4th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Infantry in August 1863. After he received the Congressional Medal of Honor for actions in the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm near Richmond, Virginia on September 29, 1864, his white officers petitioned the War Department to commission Fleetwood as an officer. The request was denied.

After the Civil War, Christian Fleetwood settled in Washington, D.C., where he worked for the federal and district governments. He was a commanding officer in the D.C. Colored National Guard, co-founded the Colored High School Cadet Corps, and directed several church choirs despite war-related hearing loss.

Sara Iredell (1841-1908) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She attended Oberlin College and taught school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Frederick, Maryland, and D.C. Iredell married Christian Fleetwood in 1869 and the couple had two daughters. She graduated in the first class of Freedmen’s Hospital Training School for Nurses in 1892, then became its first superintendent and the first Black woman on the D.C. Nurses’ Examining Board