A Black man who served in the Maryland State Militia during the War of 1812 and was long denied the military recognition most soldiers in his situation were granted has been declared a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces, putting an end to a yearslong campaign by a local amateur historian to have the honors bestowed.
Anthony C. Scire Jr., an appeals judge with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, ruled July 25 that Samuel A. Neale, a Hagerstown man whose name can be found on the muster rolls of a regiment that fought in two major battles in the War of 1812, was an American soldier in good standing and thus had the right to be granted a free tombstone for his grave.
The VA grants free headstones to any veteran of a war fought before 1990 who is buried in an unmarked grave. Neale has been buried in just such a grave at St. John’s Cemetery in Frederick since his death in June 1872.
VA officials had ruled, however, that Neale lacked the standing for recognition as a U.S. military veteran because the rank listed for him on those muster rolls – “servant” – was nonmilitary in nature, and because, as a member of a state unit, he was not in the employ of the federal government when his unit, the Washington County-based Tilghman’s Cavalry Regiment, took part in the Battle of Bladensburg and the Battle of North Point in 1814.
But Louis Giles, a retired NSA official and amateur student of the war, began taking up Neale’s case with VA officials in 2022. As Giles showed, under the rules of the Maryland militia at the time, Black men could be given no military titles no matter what duties they performed.
To Giles and others, that meant the VA was applying rules conceived and written during the slavery era that somehow had never been revised — and doing so amounted to a form of entrenched racism.
“Is a person in the VA discriminating against Blacks? I can’t say that. But whether they recognize it or not, if their policies are what they’ve told us, that’s certainly effective discrimination,” he said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun last month.
Giles also found newspaper accounts that show Neale taking the rare step, for a Black man, of appealing to the Maryland legislature for a military pension – and being granted one – in 1870, and others describe in vivid terms his actions during the war. They included his carrying surgical instruments into combat zones, wielding a weapon near active battlefields, and suffering an accidental gunshot wound.
VA officials rebuffed Giles several times over two-plus years. As a last effort, he applied for a hearing with the agency’s court of appeals and was granted a meeting with Scire in June.
“For the first time I got the feeling I was talking to someone who was listening carefully, and objectively, to the arguments,” Giles said at the time.
According to Scire’s ruling, the Maryland militia’s 1st Cavalry Regiment had in effect been federalized during the War of 1812 — summoned out of state duty and into federal service, as National Guard units often are during wartime today — and that made Neale a bona fide U.S. military veteran.
Scire also drew on the newspaper accounts about Neale — materials VA officials had earlier dismissed because they were unofficial documents— in piecing together a portrait of the Marylander’s service and postwar life.
“Mr. Neale was a member of a federalized unit which was being commanded by a lawfully appointed officer; wore a military uniform; carried arms openly; and operated within the laws and customs of war at the time,” he wrote. “Furthermore, extracts from official Maryland state files indicate that the Maryland State Legislature had recognized Mr. Neale as a Veteran for pension purposes based on his military service. Therefore, Mr. Neale is a Veteran, for VA purposes, based on his honorable active-duty wartime service with the United States Army during the War of 1812.”
As such, Scire added, Neale qualified for the free headstone, but at least in a practical sense, that ruling came too late. Giles, the president of the Society of the War of 1812 in Maryland, and supporters in the cause, had “grown tired of waiting” for approval from the VA, Neale said last month, and when a Frederick stone mason offered to supply a headstone this summer, the group accepted.
They installed it at a private ceremony in St. John’s Cemetery on July 26 — one day after Scire wrote his ruling but before a copy of the document could arrive at Giles’ home in Anne Arundel County. About 60 people attended.
The moment the stone was put in place, Giles says, the law no longer required the VA to supply one, and he notified a VA case officer of the news.
“I always believed that if I had the opportunity to appear before an impartial judge, the decision would support my views,” he said. “To me, this should have been a slam-dunk from the beginning. Not only did we have the muster roll, but supporting evidence far beyond what I have normally seen in 1812 era cases. I felt that the law clearly supported the judge’s decision.”
Representatives for the VA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
