Sharpsburg Town Square

The United States government authorized the enlistment of African Americans for the Union Army in 1863, but it was the Spring of 1864 before active recruitment began.  A company of the 19^th Regiment of the USCT (United States Colored Troops), created with Maryland soldiers, was dispatched on a recruiting mission to western Maryland in April 1864.  In Sharpsburg, the soldiers headquartered in the Methodist Church.  According to a complaint by townspeople sent to the Union military commander for the region, the USCT did not bother to differentiate between free or enslaved African Americans in their recruitment efforts.  One local farmer, Henry Piper, complained that one of his slaves, Jeremiah Summers, only 16 years old and therefore underage, had been kidnapped by the USCT recruiters. When he tried to retrieve Jeremiah, he was roughed up and arrested by the soldiers in the main square in town.  Piper and his fellow townspeople claimed that they were all very loyal to the Union, proven in part by the fact that they had voted 329 to 2 in favor of Maryland’s effort to emancipate slaves in the state, and that the citizens of Sharpsburg felt “aggrieved and outraged” by the behavior of the USCT recruiting party.  Jeremiah Summers was eventually returned to Piper.  Summers’s view of the recruiting episode has been lost to history.