Mohammed Ali Nicholas Sa’id: from enslavement to American Civil War veteran

Muhammad Ali Sa’id, who was renamed Nicholas Said upon his baptism, came from the Muslim state of Borno in the 1850s, following an odyssey that took him across the Sahara, to Mecca, Istanbul and St. Petersburg. He susbsequently traveled as a valet through western Europe to the Caribbean and North America. His trajectory from the son of a powerful general and governor in Borno to his enslaved status in the Ottoman Empire and then to a position as a freed servant to Russian nobility ultimately led to his enlistment in the all-black 55th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War in the United States.