On October 1, 1863, nine months after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton advised Lincoln that it was a military necessity in the State of Maryland to enlist all persons capable of bearing arms without regard to color. A recruiting station for colored troops was soon established at Monocacy Junction, and local slave owners received up to $300 for the enlistment of their slaves. Lincoln allowed slaves who had their owner's consent or who had escaped from owners disloyal to the Union to enlist in the army, and in return those slaves were forever thereafter free. Frederick Douglass, a former slave and leading abolitionist, declared that once a black man bore the brass letters U.S., an eagle on his button, a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, no power on earth could deny that he had earned the right to citizenship.
