Frost W. Johns, Private, Company A

From a Somerset County Cornfield to the United States Army

Frost W. Johns was a nineteen-year-old enslaved farm laborer from Somerset County, Maryland, when the Civil War reached directly into his life. His later story was remembered in strikingly simple terms: he was in the field gathering corn when Army recruiters “came after him and took him away.” Whatever mixture of coercion, opportunity, uncertainty, and hope lay behind that moment, it marked an abrupt passage from slavery into military service.

Johns enrolled at Somerset, Maryland, on November 26, 1863, and was mustered into Company A of the 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, at Camp Stanton on December 23, 1863. His military records describe him as nineteen years old, five feet three inches tall, with black complexion, black eyes, and black hair. His occupation was farmer.

Enslavement and the $300 Compensation Claim

Johns had been enslaved by James F. Williams of Somerset County. After Johns entered the Army, Williams sought compensation from the federal government under the wartime program that paid loyal slaveholders for enslaved men who enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. Williams swore that Johns was his slave for life and claimed ownership through purchase.

The surviving papers are unusually revealing. Williams executed a formal deed of manumission and release of service, declaring Frost W. Johns free from all service due him, with Johns’ freedom to commence on December 25, 1863. The Board of Claims subsequently awarded Williams $300. The transaction starkly illustrates one of the contradictions of Maryland’s wartime emancipation: Johns wore the uniform of the United States, while the government compensated the man who had claimed him as property.

With the 19th U.S. Colored Troops

Johns joined the 19th while the regiment was being organized at Camp Stanton in southern Maryland. In the spring of 1864 the regiment entered active campaigning with the Army of the Potomac. The 19th served through the Overland Campaign and the siege operations before Petersburg and took part in the disastrous Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, where Black troops suffered heavily.

Johns’s individual cards do not identify a wound at the Crater. They do show that he became sick during his service. A muster roll for the end of 1863 records him sick in hospital beginning December 18, and later records place him on hospital guard duty at City Point, Virginia, by Special Order No. 38, Headquarters Second Brigade, Fourth Division, Ninth Army Corps, dated August 9, 1864. Subsequent rolls continued to carry him on detached guard duty at City Point.

Texas and Death from Cholera

The war did not end Johns’s military service. Like the rest of the 19th Regiment, he was sent to Texas after the collapse of the Confederacy. There, far from the Somerset County fields where his Army story had begun, disease proved more dangerous to him than Confederate gunfire.

Frost W. Johns died of cholera at Rancho Santa Maria, Texas, on October 28, 1866. His company muster-out record and later War Department correspondence both record his death in Texas. He was about twenty-two years old. Because he died before the regiment’s final muster-out, he never returned to Maryland as a discharged veteran.

Remembering Frost Johns

Frost Johns’s life can be followed only in fragments, but those fragments form an unusually powerful story. At nineteen he was an enslaved farm worker in Somerset County. Army recruiters arrived while he was gathering corn, and within weeks he was a soldier of the United States. His enlistment forced his enslaver to relinquish his legal claim to him, although the federal government then paid that enslaver $300.

Johns served with a regiment that marched and fought from Virginia to the final campaigns of the Civil War and then endured an extended postwar occupation in Texas. He survived the great battles that made the 19th Regiment famous, only to die of cholera in Texas a little more than a year before he would have reached his mid-twenties.

His story is therefore not simply that of a soldier who died young. It captures, in one life, the violent transition from slavery to freedom, the federal recruitment of Black Marylanders, the contradiction of compensating loyal slaveholders, the combat service of the 19th U.S. Colored Troops, and the often-forgotten postwar service of the regiment along the Texas border.

Sources Consulted

• Compiled military service and related records of Frost W. Johns, Company A, 19th U.S. Colored Troops, National Archives and Records Administration.

• Compensation and manumission papers concerning Frost W. Johns and James F. Williams, included in the National Archives file.

• Robert K. Summers, Maryland’s Black Civil War Soldiers.

• History and Roster of Maryland Volunteers, War of 1861–6, Volume II, 19th Regiment U.S. Colored Troops, Company A.

• Henry G. Thomas, “The Colored Troops at Petersburg,” and James H. Rickard, “Services with Colored Troops in Burnside’s Corps,” for regimental campaign context