SYMHC Classics: U.S. Contraband Camps

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Coming up soon on the show, we're going to talk about someone who ran a school at a contraband camp during the US Civil War. We briefly explain what these camps were during that upcoming episode, but we also have a full episode on contraband camps, why they existed, and why enslaved and previously enslaved people were referred to as contraband during the war. So we're bringing that out today as Today's Saturday Classic. And this episode originally came out on July, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. And today we are talking about a topic that was requested on Twitter by listener parsa uh and it is contraband camps. And we have spoken before about the term contraband being used to refer to escaped or Union freed slaves during the U s Civil War, but we really haven't touched on with any detail the contraband camps where many of these people were held both during the war and through reconstruction. And as is often the case with history, the story of emancipation is just way more complicated than the broad strokes that are often used to describe it. It's definitely not as though the Emancipation Proclamation happened and voila, everyone is free and everything is great. In fact, this transition was incredibly difficult, and newly freed people often really struggled and some very bad things happened to them. And we're going to talk about some of the legal issues surrounding slaves escaping to freedom, and then we're going to get into the incident that really catalyzed, sort of accidentally, the development of contraband camps, and then we'll talk about the challenges that these camps posed, both for those living in them and for the Union Army. Yeah, both glad and sad that we're doing this episode because it's such a difficult topic, but also the idea of contraband has come up so many times in so many past episodes that I'm really glad that we will have this one to refer folks too. They want to learn more about that. Yeah, So we've talked about the fugitive Slave Acts before, but for the sake of context, we're going to do kind of a broad stroke overview of them. Here in the late seventeen hundreds, there was already a significant conflict brewing between the states that we're pushing for abolition and the slave states. There were concerns that this ongoing disagreement was going to cause really big problems and fracturing for the fledgling nations. So to try to find a compromise, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of sevente And this act built on the fugitive Slave clause that already existed in the U. S Constitution. And that clause read quote, no person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered upon claim of the party to whom such service or labor. Maybe do so to sum that up, if you escape to a free state, that doesn't mean that you're free. So the Fugitive Slaved Act of established much more specific ways for that clause to be enacted. It made provisions for slave owners and those taking or are those acting on their behalves to search for escaped slaves in free states they had to provide proof of ownership if they captured an escaped slave, but this requirement was actually pretty lax. It could be as simple as as signed affidavit swearing that yes, the captor owned the person they were holding. This law also specified a penalty of five hundred dollars to anyone who helped or hid an escape slave. In response, several states enacted personal liberty laws to circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act of seventeen ninety three and temper its abuse. These laws were designed to protect free men who might be captured and enslaved through exploitation of those kind of slack proof requirements, and also to provide escaped slaves with a right to a jury trial. But these laws were eventually overturned in eighteen forty two when the Supreme Court ruled in Prague versus Pennsylvania that state laws intended to undermine the Slave Act could not trump federal law. Even so, the Fugitive Slave Act of seventeen ninety three wasn't enforced in a lot of areas, and slave states were really angry at the number of people who were able who were able to escape into free states. But we do need to make a major note here. We've mentioned this before, but it really bears repeating that. It's not as though thousands and thousands of people were escaping from the slave states. Escaping was incredibly difficult, and while you sometimes see numbers in the thousands, you have to consider that when you look at it in proportion, the number of people who were escaping for bondage from bondage was a tiny, tiny fraction of the actual total number of enslaved people. Due to the growing discontent in slave states because of slaves running to free states, in eighteen fifty, Congress once again passed legislation in an effort to smooth things over and prevent southern secession. This included a revision to the Fugitive Slave Act. The eighteen fifty update to this act made penalties much more serious for anyone aiding or hiding escaped slaves. Instead of that five hundred dollar fine, it was a thousand dollars and there was also a six month jail sentence. Jury trials for slaves were also eliminated with this law, and federal commissioners were given the power to oversee individual cases. On May twenty three of eighteen sixty, one. So just about six weeks after the US Civil War officially started on April twelve, three escaped slaves managed to cross Virginia's James River and make it to Fort Monroe. This is a military post that was occupied by the Union. Those three men, who were named Frank Baker, Shephard Malloy and James Townsend, had been forced into Confederate service by their owner, working for the hundred and fifteenth Virginia Militia. Their primary job was building an artillery emplacement across from Fort Monroe at Sewell's Point, But when word reached them that their owner, Charles Mallory, intended to next send them to North Carolina, a move that would take them farther away from their homes, the three men decided that they were going to risk and escape by water in the dark of night and face the unknown reception they would get at the with the Union forces. When the men were brought before Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler, who was not an especially kind or delightful person, he questioned them on a number of points, ranging from the identity of their master, to the reason why they had fled, to the work that they had been doing for the Confederates. After the interview, Butler considered the situation, and keep in mind that these men who had run and we're looking for help, we're kind of sent away from this interview with no indication as to what was going to happen to them next. But as Butler ruminated, UH, he considered the fact that by law, slaves were supposed to be returned. But if he handed these men back over to the enemy side, they would be used to continue building the artillery emplacement that was targeting his own fort. And they had also given him some military intelligence in the course of their interview. So while Butler was not himself an abolitionist, he wasn't particularly keen on sending Baker, Shepard, and Mallory back to the rebels. In the meantime, an officer from the rebel camp, Major John baytop Carry, had arrived at the fort to collect to these three escaped men, And in this critical moment, General Butler tapped into his knowledge of law. He had been a practicing attorney UH for years before he found himself at Fort Monroe, Virginia, had succeeded less than a day before the three fugitives were brought before him. So when he met with Major Kerry, he stated quite clearly that he was not going to turn over the three men, and he told the Major quote, I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be. I know, we already established that he's not a particularly kind or delightful person, but when I was reading this outline for the first time, I got to that point and I was kind of like, yeah, well, and he there is a there's more back and forth between the two of them that you'll hear, and it it is sort of a like, but you said we couldn't be a foreign country. The Union isn't accepting our secession, and he's like, but you're saying you're succeeding, and he does sort of really turn on his law. Um, I got lawyered. Yeah. So he was also operating under the military law that a commander could seize property from his enemy if that property was used with hostile intent, and because the men had been building an artillery emplacement and were considered property by the Confederacy, he felt that he had full legal grounds to keep them. Yes, so while he was maybe not an abolitionist, he was really, really happy to kind of uh turn these confederates own words against them and kind of you know, sticking in the ribs with his law knowledge. Uh. And while Butler did know that this decision was going to carry some import in it, that it was going to add a layer of complexity to the war, what he might not have realized was just exactly what he was catalyzing and how big it was going to become. Two days later, eight more escaped slaves arrived at Fort Monroe, and on the third day there were forty seven more. And that was only the beginning. As words spread, more slave made their way to the fort in the hopes of sanctuary, and their ranks became more varied. At first it was just young men, but soon it included women, children, and the elderly, and Fort Monroe soon earned the nickname Freedom Fort. That decision on the part of General Butler really set up a situation that was kind of a conundrum for the government. And we will talk about that after a pause for a brief word from one of our wonderful sponsors, so to get back to our story, asked for President Lincoln. He was really not sure what to do about all these fugitive slaves. He left the decision of how to handle this growing number of refugees up to General Butler, with the reminder that the military commander was at Fort Monroe to fight the war, not to emancipate people. Some bureaucratic suggestions were made by Cabinet Secretary Montgomery Blair, including keeping the strong men to help at the war and letting the rest go. And one newspaper this case drew media attention almost from the moment that it began, suggested keeping the slaves until the end of the war and then selling them back to their former owners at a rate that would reimburse the union for their care. Yeah, everybody kind of had an opinion on what to do, uh, And some of them were abhorrent, some of them were horrifying. By early June, though, the numbers of escaped slaves at Fort Monroe numbered more than five hundred, and the word contrabands was being used almost universally in the press and in the military at the time to refer to them. And as we've talked about, we've we've mentioned that word many times as a reference to escape slaves on the podcast. But there was a New York Times magazine article from twenty eleven that I came across written by Adam Goodheart, and it beautifully explains why this word caught on so quickly, and he says, quote, were these blacks people or property? Free or slave? Such questions were as yet unanswerable, for answering them would have raised a host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address, contrabands. Let the speaker or writer off the hook by letting the escape ees be all of those things at once. It wasn't long before people were escaping and running to other Union positions as well. And while some Union officers followed Butler's lead, they didn't all do that. Particularly in the border states. Enslaved people were often returned to their masters by Union forces, but this didn't stop people from trying to gain refuge at Union encampments. Finally, in an effort to create some sort of consistency to how these things were being handled, the Union issued the First Confiscation Act on August six, eighteen sixty one, and this legislation declared that the Union had the right to see slaves. That was as part of a broader statement the Confederate property of any kind could be taken by Union troops. It also stated that slaveholders had no rights to ownership, but the wording of this act was really problematic, and that it did not make clear whether or not the slaves themselves were then going to be free. The day after the passing of the First Confiscation Act, which was August seven, Confederate troops burned the town of Hampton, Virginia, which sat across the water from Fort Monroe, after the white citizens of the town evacuated. The Confederates didn't want Union troops to seize Hampton for use as a winter quarters, for one thing, but they were also really uneasy at the growing numbers of of enslaved people who were making their way to the area in search for freedom, and so they sort of created a unique opportunity because in the abandoned areas adjacent to this burned city, the community of what became known as the Grand Contraband Camp formed. And this started as a community that was bound by the existing roads of the area, but as it ex banded and refined its organizational structure, new streets were established, and all of those were named for Union generals. But the First Confiscation Act was only one of several pieces of legislation created to organize a more unified plan for handling escaped slaves. The Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves was passed in March eighteen sixty two, and with this act, Congress prevented the military from sending fugitive slaves back into slavery. In July eighteen sixty two, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, and this act further clarified the Union position that any slaves who sought refuge in Union areas would be considered captives of war and would be freed. This is something of a prelude to the Emancipation Proclamation. While it clearly stated that slaves would be freed, it only applied to people escaping who made their way to Union occupied areas. And through all of this congressional maneuver ring uh enslaved people continued to seek asylum with Union forces, and eventually makeshift camps were set up for them. In addition to it wasn't just the Grand Contraband Camp. They were sort of throwing together camps in a lot of different places, and they all came to be known as contraband camps, and as news of each of these laws spread, the numbers in those camps swelled, and they swelled again with the announcement of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September twenty, eighteen sixty two, which stated that quote on the first day of January, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then thenceforward and forever free. But it wasn't as though any of the people that had already gone to Union positions for help could then be told go away. Until January one, this situation continued to grow, and it needed organization and order. Along Themsissippi Valley, Ulysses S. Grant named a superintendent of contrabands, and that was John Eaton, who was the chaplain of the Seven Ohio Infantry. Initially, Eaton organized the refugees into groups and gave those who were capable of working work to do. The Union paid twelve and a half cents for every picked pound of cotton. Their clothing and board was deducted out of these earnings. Other men were tapped for leadership positions and organizing contraband camps throughout additional regions. For the most part, their work followed a similar model. In addition to picking cotton, jobs such as downing trees or cleary gland and construction projects were also assigned to the refugees capable of and willing to do labor. In a camp in Corinth, Mississippi, freedmen were tasked with the work that transition the camp from a makeshift tent set up to an actual small town with something of an infrastructure. There were eventually cabins, streets, school, a hospital, a church, and a commissary, and it was all arranged into neighborhood wards and at its most populated, the Corinth Camp was home to six thousand people. As land was confiscated by the Union in areas around camps, the task of farming that land also fell to the camp residents. This enterprise was quite successful, eventually turning regular profits and the proceeds of that went to the government. But in the case of the Corinth Camp, as successful as it was and in the research that I was doing, it often gets referenced as like this example of like a perfect execution of how to do this, but it was still never considered a permanent solution. In the eighteen sixty eight sixty four winter, all of the camp's residents were moved to Memphis. The abandoned village was then just left behind for Confederate forces to take over. So, while we've been talking about Fort Monroe and Corinth, there were also camps dotted throughout the occupied South. In North Carolina, for example, there were more than seventeen thousand people living in contraband camps by eighteen sixty four, and because overcrowding became a very real problem in a lot of camps, the military relocated some of these people to government farms. And when black regiments were formed within the Union Army in the second half of the Civil War, they recruited from contraband camps, and in some cases men enlisted with the understanding that in reciprocation, the Union Army was going to take care of their families, though those agreements were not always honored. And this brings us to another important element of contraband camps, which is the incredibly poor treatment that many of the people who lived there actually wound up receiving. We'll talk about that in just a moment, but first we will take a quick break for a word from a sponsor. We've spoken pretty often on our show about how racism and contradiction to how it's often depicted is not just a Southern problem, and this was certainly the case in regard to these contraband camps. Union soldiers were often opposed to having camps filled with escaped slaves adjacent to their own camps, even as many of the people living there were working and contributing to the war effort. And this of course was not an issue exclusive to the military either. When black refugees made their way out of Confederate territory into places such as Washington, d c. They were not necessarily greeted with open arms. White Northerners could be very vocal about their disdain for the refugees, so in some cases the military actually intervened to move these people into contraband camps. That meant that people who had fought so hard to get to freedom found themselves relocated to camps, sometimes back in Union occupied areas of the very states that they had fled, and often in very poor conditions. For one thing, many of the services that were set up in camps were predicated on the idea that the people living there were lazy and shiftless and even untrustworthy. A lot of the education was designed to teach escaped slaves how to be more like white people, and it addressed people as though they were simpletons. Additionally, the wages that were being paid for the work that the refugees was doing was incredibly low. But there was a much more pressing issue at many of the camps. As numbers grew and the Union continued to shuffle people around, it was hard for the basic necessities of shelter, food, clothing, and medical care to be met for many of the camp residents. In some camps, people literally starved to death or became ill and died simply because they couldn't get treatment. We know that the military suffered incredible losses due to illness such as malaria and smallpox during this time as well, so it makes sense that the same illnesses were hitting the camps that were growing right alongside the Union Army. Often, contraband camp residents who pleaded with military if shals for help were seen as nuisances, even though they were simply trying to secure basic survival needs for themselves and their families. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January one of eighteen sixty three, freeing all slaves in the rebelling States. And while this was an important moment, as we mentioned at the beginning of this episode, it's not as though suddenly everything was super great for former slaves. Aside from the fact that the war was still going on. Health issues remained a significant and pressing problem. Yeah, and then that a lot of places that was not honored either. So between eighteen sixty three and eighteen sixty six, sixty thou freed slaves died of smallpox. An estimated total of one million of the four million freed slaves became sick, and many of them died from their illnesses, and that data was framed for a really long time as being the result of an inherent lack of hygiene among the newly freed. Unfortunately, that false information was allowed to propagate for a great length of time due to some incredibly bigoted attitudes, including some people who felt that this high mortality rate somehow proved that black people couldn't survive outside the construct of slavery, and things were so bad that there was a popular and super racist theory that the black race in the US was going to go extinct because it simply couldn't handle freedom. But in fact, the lack of resources and a lack of treatment options led to out outright neglect when it came to dealing with the illnesses that became so common amongst freed people. Many of them were still in contraband camps and their environments were overcrowded. The available options for care available to white people dealing with the same illnesses were mostly closed off to black people, and the military had really become stretched beyond its limits. Yeah, we spoke earlier of there being some infrastructure in the lives of escaped slaves, but I'm going to backtrack on that a little bit. Sort of. There was to some degree a sort of community infrastructure to some of these camps, in terms of well organized neighborhoods and social systems, but there was not at all an infrastructure that enabled the government to provide for the scores of sick and injured people in the military, let alone support the large numbers of newly freed people who were going through this massive sea change and needed assistance to get through that transition. Unfortunately, emancipation created a situation that the United States government was just not prepared to deal with. There were serious challenges to the freedmen who found themselves suddenly outside the structure of their slavery bound lives. The shortages of food, clothing, and shelter for newly emancipated people continued to be a serious problem and a grave one. Survival was a struggle in the best of circumstances. Even after emancipation, there were still people being moved into contraband camps. There just weren't enough options or places for emancipated slaves to go. But there were also freedmen who were diligent in avoiding the camps as their reputations for their high mortality rates really started to spread. So as a sort of stop gap, an Act of Congress created the U. S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands were commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau, and they created it on March third of eighteen sixty five. That was a little less than two months after the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution formally abolished slavery, and two months before generally officially surrendered and ended the war. The Bureau was part of the war Department, and it was intended to last until the war ended, plus one additional year to provide the support and services to freed slave that it had been so lacking up until that point. But this was really not a magic fix. The country had never had to create a welfare program before and had never had to provide for a large number of refugees, so there was a bit of guests work going on in all of this, And of course there were plenty of people completely opposed to the Freedman's Bureau even after the war ended. Many southern states were against it, and President Andrew Johnson, who you will recall took office after Lincoln was shot, vetoed an extension of the bureau's life and powers. In eighteen sixty six. Congress overrode that veto, but internal debate still raged over how to structure aid and assistance provided by the organization. The Freedman's Bureau did do a lot of good work. It built hospitals and provided medical aid. It helped former slaves with legal issues, including establishing marriages in the legal record, which, as we've mentioned in past episodes, didn't really exist before. That helped family members find each other. You can actually find digitized copies of Freedman's Bureau records of people trying to find their family members who had been held elsewhere in bondage. And it advocated for black workers and labor disputes disputes, and set up educational institutions. But as much as it was trying to do all these things as well as it could, it was woefully underfunded and there was never enough staff to meet its goals. The most agents as they were called, which were basically sort of akin to social workers that the Freedman's Bureau ever had at one time was nine hundred, and that was nine hundred people to assist the approximately four million people who had been freed. Takes very little math knowledge to know that that is an overwhelming disparity of numbers, and those agents that were doing that work we're working during reconstruction, when there was still a lot of bitterness and roadblocking of their efforts. The Bureau was finally shut down in eighteen seventy two. After the war ended, many of the contraband camps that weren't dismantled slowly transitioned into basically a black neighborhood, even as white residents moved into the area. The Grand Entreband Camp in Hampton, Virginia that we talked about earlier was one of those, and it turned out that the person who had owned the land where the camp began, Jefferson Bonaparte Sinclair, went bankrupt and this opened the door for some of the people who had settled there in the camp to purchase their homes after the court divided the land into parcels. These are some of the first instances of freed people buying property on record, and the Hampton Camp continues to be a place of interest. Beginning in archaeological investigation of the site of the Grand Contraband Camp started. The site had been built over, but the apartment building that had been standing on the main site was demolished and the James River Institute of Archaeology started excavating the area to try to learn more about the lives of the people who had lived in the camp. Yeah, there's an excellent article in Archaeology Magazine online where they talk about some of their early findings, and that will be in our show notes. But the legacy of health discrimination, which has has its roots during this tumultuous and pivotal time in US history continues to be discussed by historians and social workers alike. UH. If you're interested in exploring that issue in far more depth, I highly recommend the book Sick from Freedom by Jim Downs. It is not an easy read. There are a lot of very difficult stories to discover in that book, but it's really eye opening. It's an incredible exploration of the suffering that went on in many contraband camps, and it's important for people to know this stuff was happening, So I highly recommend it. There's also, again it will be in our show notes, an excellent lecture that he gave at the U. S National Archives a couple of years ago, where he talks about both some of these issues. It's only an hour long lecture, so he doesn't go into all of the details, but he talks not only about some of these issues, but the way that information has been bent and reframed and perceived by various special interesting groups along the way, and some people using this sort of information for their own ends that is gross and racist, UH, as well as people not always wanting to acknowledge how bad some of this went, because it makes it seem like emancipation was a bad thing, which it obviously was not, but it was a challenging thing. So uh, that's the scoop on contraband camps. Thank you so much Carsa for suggesting it. It had kind of been lurking for a while on my list and I think on Tracy's list as well. Uh, and it just seemed like time to tackle it finally, So pay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H