Sotterley Plantation

Sotterley Plantation. A Generation Divided, A Battle Joined. , When the war began in 1861, Sotterley Plantation still relied on slave labor as did other plantations in Southern Maryland. Sotterley's owner, Dr. Walter Hanson Stone Briscoe, served as the surgeon for the Smallwood Vigilantes, a local Confederate infantry company. Federal troops camped nearby regularly searched Sotterley. Three of Walter and Emeline Briscoe's sons (Chapman, David, and Henry Briscoe) went to Richmond, Virginia, and enlisted in Confederate service in Co. H, 1st Maryland Infantry. When the regiment mustered out of service in 1862, the brothers' lives diverged. Sgt. Chapman Briscoe, who had suffered a life-threatening illness, received a government clerkship in Richmond. He married there and remained in the city after the war. Pvt. David Briscoe was promoted to 2nd Lt. in Co. D, 43rd Virginia Cavalry (Mosby's Rangers). After the war he became an attorney in Baltimore. Pvt. Henry Briscoe served as an assistant surgeon in Richmond, then was assigned to the 26th Virginia Infantry at Petersburg from April 1864 until August, when he was wounded. Furloughed for thirty days, he returned in September as 3rd Lt. and was assigned to Wise's Brigade in 1865. He surrendered with the army in Appomattox Court House, returned to Sotterley, and became a physician in Baltimore., [Sidebar:] , George Washington Barnes, enslaved by Dr. Briscoe, enlisted in Co. I, 7th U.S. Colored Troops, in 1863. The army changed his surname to Briscoe. He and his regiment, assigned to Gen. Benjamin F. Butler's Army of the James, joined the reserve troops in the trenches besieging Petersburg on August 25, 1864. Barnes and Henry Briscoe, son of Barnes's former owner, served in their respective armies there. In 1866, the 7th was transferred to Indianola, Texas, for guard duty. Just days before it returned to Baltimore and disbanded, Barnes, a free man, died of cholera., St. Mary's County slaveholders resented the U.S. draft of 1864, and substituted slaves to meet the county's quota. Blacks enlisted at the contraband settlement near Point Lookout at the southern tip of the county, where many joined the 38th U.S.C.T., and also just north of Benedict in Charles County., More than 600 local African American men, enslaved and free, served in U.S.C.T. regiments. Pvt. William H. Barnes and Sgt. James H. Harris, both from St. Mary's County, received the Medal of Honor for bravery at the Battle of New Market Heights near Ft. Harrison, Virginia, on September 29, 1864. Barnes also received the solid silver "Butler medal," one of 200 that Gen. Butler awarded to his bravest black troops, and wore it in his photograph.