One day when my son was in elementary school and studying the Civil War, my dad told my son, "The Civil War wasn't civil!" Right he was, but I wonder what else he would have told my son if he had known that his 2nd great grandfather had fought in the war, along with his brother, to secure their own freedom and, consequently, ours as well. In fact, when I was young, my dad used to take me to one of his favorite places to think: The VA Hospital on the James River just near Fort Monroe. Unbeknownst to him, he was introducing me to the exact land where his ancestors trained for their roles in the war. In this story, take a journey into Isaac and Robert Forbes' experiences serving in the Civil War alongside thousands of other Black men who refused to be bound by slavery and took it upon themselves to stake their claim in a country that they had helped to build without compensation.