HAMPTON, Va. -- It's not something you see every day on a Civil War tour: Two guys with deep Southern roots, one black, one white, gazing side by side into their shared, violent past.

Then again, this isn't actually a Civil War tour -- yet.

Asa Gordon and Robert Freis are looking to tell the underreported tale of African American soldiers in Virginia. Right now, they're standing beside the thick stone walls of old Fort Monroe, looking for a place to begin.

What Gen. Benjamin Butler did here in May 1861 seems to fit the bill.

As the introductory video at the Fort Monroe museum explains, the old fort -- which remained in Union hands throughout the conflict -- "provided the setting for a seemingly trivial incident which was to have great consequences." Three runaway slaves sought sanctuary. Their owner, Col. Charles Mallory of Hampton, sent a message to Butler, the Union commander, demanding their return under the Fugitive Slave Law.

Forget it, Butler said.

Hadn't Virginia seceded from the Union the month before? Didn't that mean U.S. laws no longer applied? In wartime, enemy property is fair game, and since the South treated slaves as property, they could be confiscated as "contraband of war." Of course, if the colonel would swear allegiance to the United States -- well, that would be a different story, wouldn't it?

"Butler put him in a position of damned if you do and damned if you don't," says Gordon with a grin.

When local blacks heard of Butler's decision, large numbers began to materialize at what they called "the Freedom Fort." Many were put to work, with pay, as badly needed laborers. Some ended up in military service. As the war went on, slaves throughout the South sought freedom within the Union lines. Eventually, as the museum video explains matter-of-factly, this "led to the enlistment of over 200,000 blacks in the Union army and navy."

The story Freis and Gordon want to tell has been largely overlooked for 140 years -- by whites as well as blacks, but for different reasons.

Among whites, booming interest in the Civil War has largely centered on major battlefield action, much of which occurred before black troops played a part. For most of the millions of visitors drawn to Gettysburg, Manassas or Antietam, the rich narrative of strategy, tactics, valor and sacrifice has overshadowed the war's racial underpinnings.

Yet to most African Americans, as Gordon and Freis point out, the Civil War appears radically different and much simpler. One side was defending slavery and one wasn't. As for all that blue-gray battlefield drama, well -- that's white people's territory.

"They say, 'I don't want to hear that, that's their story,' " Gordon says. "I say, 'No, let's expand it, we've got to tell the story.' "

A 64-year-old native of Savannah, Ga., Gordon came north to attend Hampton Institute because blacks weren't welcome at major state-run Georgia colleges in those days. He marched against segregation, studied physics and wound up with a job at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. History became an avocation.

In the 1990s, after taking early retirement from Goddard, Gordon got involved with creating an African American Civil War Memorial in Washington. He heads an organization called the Sons and Daughters of the United States Colored Troops. Last year, an article about him in the Richmond Times-Dispatch produced an e-mail from a fledgling for-profit outfit called Civil War Weekend: Would he like to collaborate on an African American Civil War tour?

Probably not. Civil War buffs, in Gordon's experience, were likely to be white guys who spent too much time talking tactical mumbo-jumbo.

Robert Freis talked him into it.

Freis is a 49-year-old Shenandoah Valley native. As a 23-year-old reporter in Culpeper, Va., he befriended a military historian named Jay Luvaas, who believed tramping through historic landscape and stopping to read the words of men who fought there brought the war home in ways no classroom presentation could.

For a decade and a half, Freis has led annual weekend tours for friends and friends of friends. Now he's turned pro.

Saving Fort Pocahontas

Freis and Gordon are cruising east through lush green landscape north of the James River.

It was May 24, 1864. Behind the line of earthworks snaking through the woods, 1,100 Union troops -- all African American except for the usual white officers -- faced 2,000 dismounted Confederate cavalrymen. The rebels were led by Robert E. Lee's nephew, Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee. They sent a message demanding immediate surrender, on the grounds that it would be impossible for the bluecoats to hold out.

The Confederates charged.

Standing here on the banks of the James now, it's easy to see yourself huddling behind those earthworks, rifle cradled in sweaty hands, thinking you might have just a few more minutes to live. Then the putt-putting of Harrison Tyler's golf cart jerks you back to the 21st century.

Tyler is the owner of this particular battlefield, known as both Fort Pocahontas and Wilson's Wharf; he snapped it up after a would-be developer went bankrupt. A big-boned, silver-haired man in his late seventies, Tyler has an astonishing family tree. One maternal ancestor was Edmund Ruffin, the ardent secessionist credited with firing the shot at Fort Sumter in 1861 that kicked off the Civil War. He is also the proud descendant of Pocahontas and the grandson of President John Tyler, whose nearby plantation house, Sherwood Forest, remains in the family. (That's right, grandson: President Tyler, who died in 1862, and Harrison Tyler's father, who died in 1935, had children late in life after being widowed and remarrying.)

The battle at Fort Pocahontas was part of a Union push toward Richmond, and the fort was built, Tyler explains, "to protect this narrow part of the river."

No problem. The black troops routed Fitzhugh Lee's men, inflicting substantial casualties while sustaining relatively few.

Freis and Gordon love this story, and that the battlefield is in really good shape. It should be a highlight of what the two have taken to calling the "Fight for Freedom" tour.

If the tour happens.

Meanwhile, they've stored up tales to tell.