Maryland's Eastern Shore Hundreds of Enslaved and Free Black Men Enlisted - Denton, MD - Civil Rights Memorials on Waymarking.com

LOCATION: 16 North 2nd Street on the front lawn of the Caroline County Historical Society, Museum of Rural Life, Denton, MD USA 21629

TEXT on the historical marker:

Maryland's Eastern Shore-Hundreds of Enslaved and Free Black Men Enlisted-Although isolated from Maryland's largest population centers, the Eastern Shore was important to the state's role in the Civil War and exemplified the citizens' divided loyalties.

In the years before the war, enslaved African-Americans here began escaping bondage via the Underground Railroad to the North and Canada, helped on their way by sympathetic blacks and whites and such courageous “conductors” as Harriet Tubman, an Eastern Shore native. During the war, hundreds of enslaved and free black men from the Eastern Shore enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, the black units authorized in January 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Afterward, returning black veterans established towns and emancipation celebrations that still survive today.

Some of the Shore's white residents held fast to the Union, while others supported the Confederacy. Although combat bypassed this area, families here as elsewhere suffered the loss of their men as well as the hardships of war. Newspaper publishers suspected of disloyalty to the Union were arrested. Streams and towns on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay became smugglers' havens as enterprising watermen ran the Federal blockade to supply Confederate forces. When the conflict ended, Eastern Shore residents returned to their fields and fishing vessels, and the passions of war subsided.

Please drive carefully as you visit Civil War Trails sites on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Civil Right Type: Race (includes U.S. Civil Rights movement)

Visit Instructions:
You must have visited the site in person, not online.

Recent Visits/Logs:

Date Logged Log User Rating   10/06/2022 Don.Morfe visited it