Explore Black Ancestry & Heritage.
From the cotton fields of Mississippi to the Freedmen settlements of Indian Territory, and from the battlefields of the United States Colored Troops to the classrooms of postwar America, Bloodlines of the Republic traces a family’s unbroken struggle for freedom, identity, and purpose.
Through meticulous research and ancestral discovery, Thomas L. Smith reveals the intertwined stories of his forebears, Harrison Harding and his son Thomas, soldiers of the 12th and 14th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiments; Aggie Sams Eastman, a Chickasaw Freedwoman born into slavery under Charles and Betsy Eastman; and the Ragland line, whose search for faith, education, and belonging carried the torch of moral resistance into the next century.
Binding these families together is a remarkable historical thread: Major Thomas Jefferson Morgan, the Union officer who trained the Hardings and later served as the 25th Commissioner of Indian Affairs, bridging the destinies of African American soldiers and Native Freedmen communities.
Drawing from military archives, Freedmen Rolls, oral histories, and long-forgotten documents, Smith reconstructs the American narrative from the inside out — one where bloodlines cross racial, tribal, and spiritual boundaries to form a truer portrait of the Republic itself.
This is more than genealogy.
It is the reweaving of a nation’s forgotten tapestry, told through the descendants who refused to be erased.
