News of the bombardment of Fort Sumter inspired many African American men to enlist in the U.S. armed forces, but federal law initially prohibited their service. Frederick Douglass and other black leaders pressed for change, and by mid-1862, as white volunteers declined, the U.S. Army’s needs grew, and the Emancipation Proclamation neared, support for black recruitment increased. The Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, formally authorized African American military service. By the end of the war, about 200,000 blacks, including some from Perquimans County, had served in the U.S. Army, almost 10 percent of total enlistments, and about 19,000 had served in the U.S. Navy. In 1910, women of the county’s black community, many of them wives and widows of those men, organized through First Baptist Church and the United Daughters of Union Veterans to erect one of the nation’s few monuments to African American Union soldiers on Academy Green. It bears the inscription “In Memory of the Colored Union Soldiers Who Fought in the War of 1861-1865.” Academy Green had been the site of the county’s first black school, library, and church, which freedmen formed in a bush shelter in 1866, and the congregation later built a church across the street. Three of the men remembered there are buried in Perquimans County. Sgt. John Gordon served in Co. A, 1st U.S.C.T., organized in Washington, D.C., in May-June 1863; the regiment fought in Virginia at Wilson’s Wharf, The Crater, and New Market Heights, in North Carolina at Fort Fisher, joined Gen. Edward A. Wild’s eastern N.C. expedition in Dec. 1863, burned a Confederate camp near Hertford, and mustered out on Sept. 29, 1865. Pvt. John Sharp enlisted in Co. B, 37th U.S.C.T., at age 19 on Jan. 21, 1864, in Plymouth, N.C.; his regiment fought at New Market Heights and Fort Fisher and mustered out on Feb. 11, 1867. Pvt. Arthur Mixon served in Co. G, 40th U.S.C.T., organized in Aug. 1864 in Tennessee, where it guarded railroads and bridges, and it mustered out in Oct. 1865.