Camp Stanton, established in August 1863 and named for Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, was a Civil War-era recruiting and training post for African American Union soldiers. Although black soldiers had served in the nation’s armed forces since the Revolutionary War, they were barred from the U.S. Army during the Civil War until President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The 7th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, organized in Baltimore, trained there, and the 9th, 19th, and 30th Regiments were organized and trained at the camp; all of these units saw hard combat in Virginia during the last campaigns of the war. Slightly downriver stood The Plains, a plantation owned by Col. John H. Sothoron, one of the wealthiest men in Southern Maryland and an ardent secessionist. On October 20, 1863, U.S. Army Lt. Eben White arrived there on a mission to recruit black soldiers, accompanied by two USCTs, and a scuffle followed that inflamed Sothoron and one of his sons, home on leave from the Confederate army; White was killed and Sothoron fled to Virginia. Sothoron’s wife and children left their home until after the war, while The Plains housed former slaves from Virginia’s Northern Neck. In November 1868, a St. Mary’s County jury acquitted Sothoron in White’s death, and Sothoron later filed a $98,638 claim against the U.S. government for losses and damages sustained at The Plains, but the claim was rejected in 1875.