SYMHC Classics: U.S. Contraband Camps

This 2016 episode covers when three escapees from enslavement showed up at a Union position during the U.S. Civil War. The decision of how to handle the situation fell to Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, and his actions led to a situation for which the government was simply not prepared.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:26):
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,

(00:51):
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

(01:15):
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

(01:37):
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,

(01:58):
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

(02:21):
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

(02:44):
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,

(03:05):
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

(03:28):
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

(03:50):
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.

(04:12):
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

(04:32):
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

(04:55):
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

(05:19):
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.

(05:43):
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

(06:04):
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

(06:28):
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

(06:50):
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

(07:13):
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

(07:36):
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

(07:56):
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

(08:19):
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,

(08:42):
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

(09:02):
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

(09:23):
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

(09:44):
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

(10:05):
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

(10:33):
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

(10:53):
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

(11:15):
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

(11:38):
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?

(12:00):
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

(12:22):
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

(12:45):
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

(13:05):
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

(13:28):
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

(13:52):
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

(14:16):
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

(14:37):
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

(15:01):
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

(15:24):
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

(15:46):
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,

(16:09):
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

(16:31):
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

(16:51):
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

(17:14):
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

(17:37):
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

(17:58):
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

(18:18):
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

(18:40):
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

(19:03):
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,

(19:24):
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

(19:46):
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

(20:07):
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

(20:29):
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

(20:50):
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,

(21:14):
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

(21:37):
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,

(22:00):
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

(22:22):
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

(22:45):
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

(23:05):
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

(23:26):
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

(23:50):
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

(24:10):
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

(24:32):
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.

(24:53):
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

(25:16):
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

(25:38):
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.

(26:00):
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

(26:22):
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.

(26:43):
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

(27:05):
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

(27:29):
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

(27:50):
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

(28:12):
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

(28:34):
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

(28:55):
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.

(29:15):
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
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(29:36):
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(29:57):
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