It’s always exciting to obtain fresh perspectives and insights on the county’s past when scholars take a serious look at our history. These thorough investigations, requiring months of intensive digging into original documents and a critical evaluation of the primary sources, are valuable — they focus on specific research questions and use the highest principles of historical inquiry and analysis to piece together an understanding of things that came before us.
Eric Mease is one of those bringing a scholar’s fresh eye to an unstudied subject in Cecil County. As a University of Delaware graduate student, he launched an investigation two years ago that sought to piece together the story of the United States Colored Troops from this area. His Master of Arts thesis, Black Civil War Patriots of Cecil County, Maryland, was approved by the University’s history department.
His investigation began at the Historical Society as he reviewed the literature on a few things that had been done earlier, such as a 1960s register of Civil War-era African-American Troops from the county. Eric moved on from that baseline to visit cemeteries to verify his information and to add new patriots to his list. He continued by talking to families, visiting archives, studying wills and legal records, and using newspapers. Also, he poured over old newspapers, studied slave tax records and manumissions, and extracted data from census registers. Through all of this, he was able to piece together this far-reaching story for the first time. Sources he investigated indicated that 200 and 400 African-Americans from Cecil County volunteered during the Civil War. His fieldwork specifically developed information on about 200 of these men.
This valuable research title, “Black Civil War Patriots of Cecil County, Maryland,” is an open-sourced thesis available at UDspace at the University of Delaware.
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