The endless marching had just sapped the last ounce of energy coursing through Isaiah Fassett's veins.
The bluewoolen uniform that had once been his ticket to freedom now weighed on his black skin like chains.
The Worcester County native and former slave knew what would happen to him if he gave up here behind enemy lines. The Confederate troops would show no mercy, either killing him on the spot or shipping him off to a slower death within the walls of a prison camp.
Now, he was onthe verge of giving himself over to that grim fate. That's how much the war had worn Fassett down.
He stopped at a grassy spot beneath a shady tree— afitting, final resting place, he thought to himself.
Then something above his head drew his attention: a black man, dangling lifeless by his neck from one of the branches.
"I realized there was no need to stop after all," Fassett told a family member decades later, according to one historian, "and I found energy I didn't have."
Fassettwas part of a wave of more than 1,200 Lower Shore black soldiers who fought in the Civil War on behalf of the Union. Across the North, nearly 190,000 free blacksand former slaves enlisted in the army.
More:Marker controversy shows Gen. Winder's life still defined by darkest chapter
Recent events have elevated black foot soldiers out of the footnotes of history. The role they played in the Civil War has emerged as a subplot in the larger debateover public displays of Confederate symbols.
Their sizable presence in the Union ranks, while often compulsory, underscores that the bloody conflict was waged to end slavery, said Clara Small, a leading historian of the Eastern Shore's black community.
“There’s so many misconceptions about soldiers and that blacks did not serve in the Civil War," the retired Salisbury University history professor said."Well, that’s not true.”
Small hopes to use a Black History Month forum to set the record straight.She is giving the keynote lecture Feb. 8at SU on Delmarva's African-American Civil War troops, a topic that has animated two of her tomes and a third in progress (about Talbot County soldiers).
Her message is that black history is American history.
“American history is a shared history," Small said. "There were a lot of people working together. Basically speaking, we have the same concerns — African-Americans and everybody else— to survive, to make things better for the next generation. What happens is we ignore that in many instances and (think) we’re so different. And it’s not like that.”
From Baltimore to Dallas, cities and states have been removing Confederate monuments seen as symbols of white supremacy. Many were erected during the Jim Crow era and at the height of the civil rights movement.
Counter-protesters say taking down the markers erases history.
More:Papers of J. Millard Tawes, Crisfield native and former governor, headed to Nabb Center
In South Carolina, two state lawmakers in December proposed building a monument on statehouse grounds to honor black Confederate soldiers. Pension records, however, show the state never recognized any African-Americans in its fighting force, according to an investigation by The State newspaper.
Black combatants fighting for the North outnumbered their counterparts in the South by about 300-1, historians estimate.
So who were the Eastern Shore's black troops?
State and federal military records have preserved important information about Maryland's black soldiers, such as their names, enlistment dates and when they mustered out.
In most cases, no anecdotes survive to add sinew to thesebare-bones biographies. But there are exceptions among these Eastern Shore men.
Men like Fassett and Carr Handy.
He broke out of slavery and lost an arm in the war
For thousands of slaves locked in bondage on the Shore, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was an empty promise.
Legally speaking, the decree only offered freedom to those slaves living in states under rebellion. It didn't touch those in the slaveholding, but loyal, states of Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Delaware and Maryland.
So, although the proclamation went into effect Jan. 1, 1863, Carr Handy remained another person's property in the eyes of the law. That changed Oct. 22 that year, when his owner, Dr. James A. Willing, enlisted him in the 7th Regiment Infantry of the U.S. Colored Troops.
Was Willing motivated by love of country? Did Handy yearn to suppress the Southern uprising by his own hand? History is silent on these questions.
What is known: Slave owners loyal to the Union received $300 for each slave they freed for the fight. Many did so under the belief that their slaves would soon be taxed or taken away, Small wrote in the 2010 book she co-authored with the Rev. David Briddell, "Men of Color, To Arms."
These troops were assigned to segregated units commanded by white officers.
Handy was descended from slaves tied to one of Salisbury's founding families. (The area was known as Handy's Landing as late as 1732.)
More:SU historian to headline Black History Month celebration
Between Handy's birth in 1838 and his enlistment in 1863, his father, Levin,was taken to the auction block in Princess Anne and purchased for $700 byanother owner in Georgia. Family lore holds that the elder Handy had fallen out of favor by refusing to work in the summer.
Carr Handy was 24 or 25 years old when he arrived atCamp Stanton in Charles County for his military training. Before he had to survive on the battlefield, he had to endure a winter of misery and illness at the camp that claimed the lives of several of his fellow recruits.
After a brief period patrolling around the Hampton Roads region in Virginia, the 7th was dispatched in March 1864 to Jacksonville, Florida. In its first notable fight, the force skirmished with rebel soldiers at Cedar Creek.
The regiment would see a whirlwind of action during the bitter last days of the war. Its weight was instrumental in breaking the siege at Petersburg. And the survivors in the 7th were present at Appomattox Court House, where the South's Gen. Robert E. Lee finally surrendered his army in April 1865.
Handy wasn't among them. During the heavy fighting at Petersburg, his right arm was shot off,ending his military service, Small and Briddell wrote.
After the war, Handy settled in the Tyaskin area and began investing his military pension in land holdings. Despite his missing limb, he made a comfortable living as an oysterman.
During this period, manyformer slaves labored to track down family members who had been sold to faraway owners. Handy successfully located his father in Georgia and brought him home to the Eastern Shore.
“I don’t know how he did that," said John Handy Sr., Carr's 76-year-old great-grandson. He added that his ancestor was known to be a "real tough guy," though.
Handy went on to marry a woman named Mary Church, and the couple had 10 children together. He died in 1919 at the age of 82 andwas buried in the family cemetery off Capitola Road south of Tyaskin.
A portrait of Carr hangs in the corner of the living room of John Handy's home in Salisbury. The painting shows the veteran as an older man with traces of white invading his mustache.
The portraitis based on the only known photograph of him. In it, the lens captures a proud-looking Carr Handywearinga dark, double-breasted suit and tie.
In the painting, though, Handy has donned his old Union uniform, fastened with large brass buttons. Anachronistic or not, this is how John Handy prefers to recall his great-grandfather.
“If it hadn’t been for them, we’d still have been Confederate," he said.
More:Let's dispel some myths around Samuel Chase, the Eastern Shore's native revolutionary
The oldest surviving Civil War veteran on Delmarva
Isaiah Fassett was 19 years old when his owner, Sarah A. Bruff, sold him and three of his brothers into the Union Army.
She was paid $1,600. They were free. That is, free to fight.
“They didn’t have a choice," said Briddell, who has researched the family's history with his wife Jane. Fassett was his great-great uncle.
While both free men and former slaves joined the Union cause, the vast majority of the state's 8,108 black soldiers were, like Fassett,just emerging from bondage.He spent his time in slavery on a large estate in Sinepuxent Neck in eastern Worcester County, where he cut fire logs and learned carpentry skills.
More:Civil rights activist to students: Never quit, don't let the world define you
Fassett's 9th Regiment would tread much of the same earth as Handy's force. Unlike Handy, he wasn't seriously wounded, but one story holds that he was grazed by a bullet during the fighting during the Petersburg campaign's Battle of the Crater.
There, Union soldiers dug a long shaft beneath Confederate lines and detonated a powerful explosive charge. Black troops were specially trained to lead the ensuing assault, but they were replaced at the last minute by a white division.
The initial explosion had the desired effect, killing hundreds of rebel soldiers and momentarily breaking their line of defense.
What followed was a bloody debacle in which the untrained white soldiers charged directly into the pit— as the black troops had been instructed not to do— and were mowed down by the rallying Confederates.
The bungled assault may have delayed the siege around Petersburg and Richmond, but they eventually did fall.
Fassett'sunit was among the first to march into Richmond after Confederate leaders abandoned the capital. Afterward, he was promoted to a corporal.
Fassett's legend grew over time. He returned to Berlin after the war, married a woman named Sarah Purnell and fathered eight children. He was still living during the outbreak of World War II, fighting from the home front by growing a victory garden.
He wore his Union uniform at Memorial Day parades and served as the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic's post (a precursor to the American Legion) in Berlin until it disbanded amid dwindling numbers. Then he led the Delaware chapter.
Briddell recalls attending Fassett's 100th birthday party. By then, he was known to locals, both white and black, as "Uncle Zear." The young Briddell had no idea at the time that Fassett was his actual uncle.
Fassett died June 1946 at 102 years old. He was the last surviving Civil War veteran on Delmarva and the second-to-last in Maryland, according to multiple historical accounts.
A marker honoring Fassett stands outside his church, St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Berlin.
The former slave didn't live long enoughto see the end of Jim Crow. That would have to wait for another generation, one that drew no small measure of inspiration from the African-Americans who fought their way out of slavery.
Within a decade of Fassett's death, Briddell went north to Boston University, where he was classmates with a young Martin Luther King Jr. At 86 years old, Briddell remembers with clarity halting a business trip to make his way to Memphis on the day King was assassinated in 1968.
In a speech on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, King drew a taut thematic line between the struggles of blacks during the Civil War and the civil rights movement.
"The Proclamation opened the door to self-liberation by the Negro upon which he immediately acted by deserting the plantations in the South and joining the Union armies in the North," King said. "Beyond the war years, the grim and tortured struggle of Negroes to win their own freedom is an epic of battle against frightful odds. If we have failed to do enough, it was not the will for freedom that was weak, but the forces against us which were too strong."
410-845-4630
On Twitter @Jeremy_Cox
If you go
"A Proud History: Delmarva’s Colored Civil War Troops" lecture
Who: Clara Small, retired Salisbury University professor
When: Thursday, Feb. 8, at 7 p.m.
Where: SU's Perdue Hall,Bennett Family Auditorium
Admission: Free
For more information: Call 410-548-3836 or 410-543-8106, or visit the SU website atwww.salisbury.edu.
