Maryland's Eastern Shore

Although isolated from Maryland's largest population centers, the Eastern Shore was important to the state's role in the Civil War and exemplified divided loyalties among its citizens. In the years before the war, enslaved African Americans there began escaping bondage by way of the Underground Railroad to the North and Canada, aided by sympathetic blacks and whites and by courageous conductors such as Harriet Tubman, a native of the Eastern Shore. During the war, hundreds of enslaved and free black men from the Eastern Shore enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, the black units authorized in January 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Afterward, returning black veterans established towns and emancipation celebrations that still survive today. Some white residents held fast to the Union, while others supported the Confederacy. Although combat bypassed the area, families suffered the loss of their men and the hardships of war. Newspaper publishers suspected of disloyalty to the Union were arrested. Streams and towns on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay became smugglers' havens as watermen ran the Federal blockade to supply Confederate forces. When the conflict ended, residents returned to their fields and fishing vessels, and the passions of war subsided.

Kent Narrows, Maryland · United States