He was barely 15 when the young fifer-soldier spent that unforgettable winter of 1777-78 with the ragged Continental army in its winter quarters near the little Pennsylvania village of Valley Forge.
And like all the others who lived through that winter, Isaac Hammond, “free man of color,” undoubtedly remembered it as as a defining moment in his life.
The light-skinned youngster, who probably grew up in the Roanoke River valley of North Carolina, served only a year in the Continental Line. But that year and his subsequent service as a militia fifer earned him a unique place in the military history of Fayetteville.
To this day, he is the only individual Fayettevillean to be honored with a monument dedicated to his military service.
He moves to Fayetteville
When the Revolution was won, young Isaac Hammond became a citizen of the Cape Fear town that recently had changed its name from Cross Creek to Fayetteville.
In 1787, he married a local free black woman named Dicey. When the first federal census was taken three years later in 1790, Hammond was listed as a free black householder with four “other free” individuals in his household.
Hammond was among 32 free black men listed as ``head of household'' in the 1790 census of Fayetteville.
In those years, free black people constituted as much as 10 percent of the village's 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants.
He joins Fayetteville militia
Although hedged about by restrictions that did not apply to whites, free black men were free to order their own families and vocations, and they could vote for presidential electors and members of the state legislature.
They could also serve as citizen soldiers in militia companies.
So in 1793, when Fayetteville's white gentry organized the unit known as the Fayetteville Independent Light Infantry Company, Hammond stepped forward and offered to serve as the company fifer.
For nearly 30 years thereafter, Hammond's music would sound during drills, balls, Fourth of July parades, and at funerals. When the company's first captain, Robert Adam, died in 1801, the company gathered ``on six successive Sundays, with music playing, consisting of drum and flute.'' Hammond was undoubtedly the fifer for this elaborate memorial.
His example would be taken up by other young black men.
Among them was Nelson Henderson (1791-1874). He was a slave barber, bought his own freedom in 1813, and played horns and beat the drum for other militia units right up until the Civil War. The Marquis de Lafayette probably heard Henderson's music when the famous Frenchman visited Fayetteville in 1825.
When Henderson died in 1874 at 83, he was buried ``with full military honors'' at a funeral attended by black Civil War veterans wearing the Union blue and white Confederates wearing gray.
He casts critical ballots
While census reports and other records are silent on Hammond's vocation, tradition holds that he, too, was a barber, a skill that was wholly dominated by black men until long after the Civil War.
Hammond's status as a Revolutionary War veteran and popular member of the FILI also made him something of a political power in the little town.
In closely-fought yearly elections for the ``town member'' of the North Carolina legislature, the votes of the few dozen free black men could be critical.
In an 1849 affidavit seeking a Revolutionary War pension for Hammond's descendents, a white petitioner said that in early politics, Hammond's influence among free black voters could ``frequently shape the result'' of town elections in Fayetteville.
A vivid picture of how Hammond operated is painted in affidavits describing a disputed election in 1810.
To woo his voters, Henderson employed a campaign tactic already well established. He tossed a barbecue. It must have been a great time. An affidavit said:
``There was plenty of provender and spirits. They appeared merry, and there were frequent Huzzas. … The fare included two shoats roasted and boiled victuals.''
Hammond's high spirits were not the only side of his character. The only mention of him in Cumberland County public records lists his conviction on March 16, 1809, for ``assault and battery on Lucretia Bass.'' He was made to post a bond of 50 pounds to keep the peace with her for the coming year. Bass was a free black woman who lived near the Hammond home, probably on today's Old Wilmington Road.
His legend grows
Hammond's legend was well established when he died in 1822, and it grew.
He apparently requested to be buried near the Cool Spring, on a muster ground (and Fourth of July partying spot) of the FILI, next to Cross Creek where it flows under a present-day bridge on Cool Spring Street.
Twenty years later in the 1840s, a poem celebrated his deathbed wish and burial in an unmarked grave.
Written by Louola Miller, a young lady of the town, it contained such lines as: ``And when ye rest beside the spring, At morning's dawn or evening's gloom, Discharge a volley o'er the spot, and cheer the silence of the tomb.''
More than a century later after World War II, the FILI honored its old fifer by putting down a small engraved stone at the traditional spot of his grave. It stands today near a newer and much more elaborate monument honoring the FILI itself.
Hammond's wife, Dicey, outlived him by many years. Much of what we know of this early military hero comes from her 1849 application for a Revolutionary War pension for her and his descendents.
In the petition, she said that he was the son of a barber, and that both his parents were ``Mulattoes or Mustees having no African blood in them.''
His Revolutionary War service, she said, was in the 10th North Carolina Regiment, and he served for 12 months.
The 10th Regiment was recruited in the northeastern part of the state in the summer of 1777. Plagued by bad leadership, disease, and desertion, it mustered only a few score soldiers when it arrived in Philadelphia that winter to join the Main Army of the Continental forces.
During the Valley Forge winter, its survivors were absorbed into other North Carolina regiments. It was disbanded on June 1, 1778.
Free black men, soldiers
Dicey Hammond died at 80 in 1852, a well-known figure in the town. She left her estate to her last surviving offspring, her daughter Rachel Lomack (b. 1794), whose father-in-law, William Lomack of Robeson County, was also a Revolutionary War veteran.
Other free black men from the Cape Fear area who were soldiers with Isaac Hammond in the War of Independence and who later drew pensions for their service were Philip Pettiford (1754-1825), who raised a Fayetteville family that later included many artisans; Louie Revels, whose descendent, Hiram Revels, would be a U.S. senator from Louisiana after the Civil War, was one of them. John Lomax, Thomas Bell and Thomas Hood were others.
Roy Parker Jr. (1930-2013) was a historian, and an editor and writer for The Fayetteville Times and The Fayetteville Observer.
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