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ConCLuSIon Sharpsburg, Maryland, 1862 The fires that engulfed the barns and stables of George Carey and the Mumma family were distant memories on 17 September 1862, when once again the farms outside Sharpsburg were embroiled in fire and smoke. Most people in the neighborhood had forgotten “Negro Anthony” and his desperate flights to avoid being sold south for conspiring to torch Carey’s outbuildings. Harry, the slave who stood trial for setting fire to the Mumma barn in 1822, probably did not live to see soldiers of the Third North Carolina infantry finish his work by torching the Mumma house and outbuildings during the battle.1 Much had changed in the decades since these men struck their blows against slavery. Slavery had marched across the Deep South, an expansion made possible in part by the sweat and tears of northern Marylanders. Slavery’s growth in northern Maryland had been arrested, and the area’s slave population had been whittled down by flight, manumissions, and sales. Term slavery had become commonplace, and many African Americans were experiencing bondage as a temporary yet brutal and unjust passage. By 1860, the workings of delayed and immediate manumissions had resulted in Sharpsburg having a free black population of 203, easily surpassing the village’s 150 slaves. The lives of the free and enslaved blacks who witnessed the Battle of Antietam open a window into the transformations that had remade slavery along the sectional border. Among those living near the battlefield was Nancy Miller. She had been manumitted in June 1859 and remained in the neighborhood working as a domestic servant. Also on the battlefield was a man identified by an interviewer as “the slave foreman,” who remembered that his master was a “good man to his black people.” Like many slaves in northern Maryland, he had been given wages at harvest and had been allowed to seek outside 196 Conclusion employment during slack seasons. “When I worked in harvest all day cradling wheat I was paid as much as anybody else,” he remembered, “and if I went with the horses to do teaming for a neighbor that money for what I had done was mine.” So content was this man in his position that he rebuffed the recruiters seeking volunteers for the Union Army. The experiences of Miller and the slave foreman reveal how much slavery had been modified: Masters and mistresses used freedom, harvest wages, and the opportunity to earn money to gain leverage over their chattels.2 Other slaves from the neighborhood took a bold, decisive stand for freedom . They enlisted in what had become a crusade for freedom, but they did so far from their birthplaces. Louis Jourdan was born into bondage in 1840 near Boonsboro, a small town about a dozen miles from Sharpsburg. In 1859, Jourdan, his parents, and his nine siblings were sold to traders and scattered across the Deep South. Louis and two of his brothers were shipped to New Orleans and sold to a planter in Assumption Parish. In 1864, he enlisted in the Tenth U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. Also in the fight was Fred Fowler, a fugitive from Frederick County. In 1858, Fowler caught wind that his master, a physician for a slave trader, planned on “selling him the following winter, probably because some other less valuable slave could do the work.” A free black guided Fowler to an agent of the Underground Railroad in Gettysburg, whence he was smuggled to Canada. In 1863, Fowler returned to the United States and enlisted in the Twenty-ninth Regiment of Connecticut Colored Volunteers. The paths that led Jourdan and Fowler to regiments raised in Louisiana and Connecticut underscore the extent of slavery’s reach. Slaves from northern Maryland might find themselves on a Louisiana plantation, while an enslaved man seeking his freedom could be safe only if he escaped to Canada.3 Given the marginal economic and political role that slavery played in northern Maryland, and considering the region’s comparative insignificance within the plantation system, it may be tempting to dismiss this story as an interesting but ultimately trivial footnote in the history of slavery. Indeed, some historians have suggested that the recent outpouring of studies that treat slavery’s peripheries—cities, industries, and rural areas with few plantations and slaves—has focused undue attention on these settings. Philip D. Morgan claims that these studies have unleashed a “centrifugal” tendency that has sent the historiography of slavery “spinning off in all directions.” He suggests that...

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