With Valor and Honor

More than 600 Black men from Talbot County, Maryland, served in the United States armed forces during the Civil War—an extraordinary contribution from a single Eastern Shore county. Many had been enslaved. Others were born free but lived in a society that denied them many of the basic rights of citizenship. When the opportunity to enlist finally came, they stepped forward to fight for the United States and, ultimately, for the destruction of slavery itself. With Valor and Honor tells their remarkable and largely forgotten story. Drawing upon military service records, pension files, government documents, contemporary newspapers, historical accounts, and local records, this richly illustrated history traces the experiences of Talbot County's Black servicemen from slavery and recruitment through the battlefields of the Civil War and their return home. Most served in six United States Colored Troops regiments raised in Maryland—the 4th, 7th, 9th, 19th, 30th, and 39th—while others served in additional Black regiments or the United States Navy. Their military service carried them far beyond Maryland's Eastern Shore. Talbot County men participated in some of the war's most important campaigns and engagements, including Petersburg, the Battle of the Crater, New Market Heights, Fort Gilmer, the campaigns against Wilmington and Fort Fisher, and the final operations that brought the Confederacy to defeat. Their courage came with extraordinary risks. The Confederacy refused to recognize Black soldiers on equal terms with white Union troops, exposing captured Black servicemen to the possibility of execution or enslavement. Even within the United States Army, Black soldiers initially received less pay than white soldiers and were forced to struggle for equal treatment from the government they had volunteered to defend. Their enlistment also helped transform Maryland itself. As Black men entered the Union Army, slavery remained legal in their home state. Families were separated, slaveholders resisted emancipation, and Maryland struggled over whether slavery—and the political order that sustained it—would survive the war. On November 1, 1864, Maryland abolished slavery, freeing those who remained enslaved throughout the state. Yet the story did not end with Appomattox. Talbot County's Black veterans returned to a society dramatically changed by the war but still far from equal. They reunited families, purchased land, established churches, built communities, and helped create institutions that endured for generations. Veterans of the 7th United States Colored Troops helped establish Unionville, one of Talbot County's most important postwar African American communities. Others became respected leaders within their churches and neighborhoods, carrying their wartime experiences into the difficult struggle to define freedom after slavery. With Valor and Honor also places their service within the broader history of Talbot County and Maryland. It explores Black life before the war, recruitment on the Eastern Shore, Frederick Douglass and the campaign for Black enlistment, Maryland's emancipation struggle, unequal military pay, the draft, wartime political divisions, and the complicated transition from slavery to freedom. Illustrated with historical photographs, maps, documents, newspaper accounts, and original artwork, the book connects the great events of the Civil War with the individual men and communities of Maryland's Eastern Shore. These soldiers were once enslaved laborers, farmers, watermen, husbands, fathers, sons, and neighbors. They became soldiers and sailors of the United States. Their service helped preserve the Union. Their enlistment weakened slavery. Their sacrifices helped secure freedom for those they left behind. With Valor and Honor restores these men to the history they helped make and preserves the names, experiences, and sacrifices of Talbot County's Black Civil War servicemen for future generations.