July 20, 2016 • 31 mins
When three escaped slaves 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. His actions led to a situation for which the government was simply not prepared.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from hot
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today we
are talking about a topic that was requested on Twitter
by listener carsa uh and it is Contraband camps. And
(00:24):
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
(00:44):
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 and 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
(01:07):
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. I'm both glad and sad
that we're doing this episode because it's such a difficult topic,
(01:29):
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
to if 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
(01:52):
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
(02:15):
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
(02:40):
to sum that up, if you escape to a free state,
that doesn't mean you're free. So the Fugitive Slaved Act
of see established much more specific ways for that clause
to be enacted. It made provisions for slave owners and
those taking or those acting on their behalves to search
for escape slaves in free states. They had to provide
(03:01):
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 escaped slave. In response, several states enacted
(03:26):
personal liberty laws to circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act of
seventeen ninety three and temperates 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
(03:47):
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
(04:07):
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
(04:28):
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 enslave states because of slaves running to
free states. In eighteen fifty, Congress once again passed legislation
(04:49):
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
(05:10):
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 twelfth, three escaped slaves managed to cross Virginia's
(05:30):
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
(05:52):
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
(06:14):
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
(06:36):
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
(06:57):
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, Shephard, and Mallory back to the rebels.
In the meantime, an officer from the rebel camp, Major
(07:17):
John Baytop Carry, had arrived at the fort to collect
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
(07:40):
he met with Major Carry, 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 at
that point and I was kind of like, yeah, well
(08:02):
and he there isn't There's more back and forth between
the two of them that you'll hear and it is
sort of a like, but you said we couldn't be
a foreign country. The Union isn't accepting our succession. 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
(08:24):
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 we're 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
(08:44):
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
(09:06):
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 slaves 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
(09:26):
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
(09:52):
get back to our story, asked for President Lincoln. He
was really not sure what to do about all these
unit of slave. 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
(10:17):
keeping the strong men to help at the fort 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,
(10:38):
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.
(11:01):
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 Goodhart,
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
(11:24):
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 beat 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
(11:45):
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
(12:08):
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
(12:30):
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
(12:50):
one thing, but they were also really uneasy at the
growing numbers 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
(13:11):
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 expanded 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
(13:32):
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,
(13:53):
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.
(14:17):
And through all of this congressional maneuvering 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, UH,
and they all came to be known as contraband camps.
And as news of each of these laws spread, the
(14:39):
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
(15:01):
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 the Mississippi Valley. Ulysses S.
Grant named a superintendent of contrabands, and that was John Eaton,
(15:24):
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
(15:46):
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 clearing land and construction projects
were also assigned to the refuge he is capable of
and willing to do labor in the camp In Corinth Mississippi,
freedmen were tasked with the work that transition the camp
(16:07):
from a makeshift tent set up to an actual small
town with something of an infrastructure. There were eventually cabins, streets,
a 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,
(16:30):
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
(16:53):
was still never considered a permanent solution. In the eight
sixty four winter, all of the camps res events 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,
(17:14):
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,
(17:35):
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
(17:55):
about that in just a moment, but first we will
take a quick break for a word from us offer.
We've spoken pretty often on our show about how racism
and contradictions to how it's often depicted as not just
a Southern problem, and this was certainly the case in
(18:18):
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
(18:40):
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 them elves, relocated to camps,
(19:02):
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
(19:23):
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 shovel people around, it
(19:46):
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,
(20:07):
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 officials for help
we're 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
(20:30):
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
(20:50):
a lot of places that was not honored either. So
between eighteen sixty three and eighteen sixty six, sixty thousand
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
(21:13):
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,
(21:34):
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
(21:54):
so common amongst freed people. Many of them were still
in contraband camps and the 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,
(22:14):
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
(22:37):
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
(23:00):
or 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
(23:20):
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, more commonly known as the Freedman's Bureau,
(23:43):
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 a War department, and it was
intended to last until the war ended, plus one additional
(24:05):
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 guess work going on
in all of this, and of course there were plenty
(24:26):
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 and 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
(24:49):
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
(25:11):
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
(25:31):
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
(25:54):
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 Contraband
(26:18):
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
(26:38):
of freed people buying property on record, and the Hampton
Camp continues to be a place of interest. Beginning in
two and 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 air. It's try to learn more about
(27:01):
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
(27:24):
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.
(27:44):
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
(28:05):
and perceived by various special interesting groups along the way,
and some people using this 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,
(28:25):
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 do you also also have some
listener mail. I do. And it's not depressing at all,
(28:47):
which is not to say that depressing is bad. That's
important stuff. But I have two pieces of postcard mail.
I'm gonna keep it short since that episode ran a
little bit long. The first one is from our listener Hayden.
And Hayden went to New York City on a birthday
trip and went to the Tenement Museum. One of the
things that's mentioned is finally a historic home that tells
(29:07):
the tale of the working class and not just the
wealthy elite. Uh. And so thank you so much Hayden
for thinking of us and sending us that The Tenement Museum.
You know, we love it. It is awesome. The people
that work there are incredible. Uh. And the second one
is from our listener Lindsay and she uh went to
the South Street Support Museum UH and got us a
(29:28):
trade card by the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which is
kind of this wonderful combination postcard where it shows the
great suspension bit Bridge connecting New York in Brooklyn, but
then it also has have you a Singer sewing machine
on it. It's a kind of weird uh double bill
for a postcard, but I love it, so thank you
very very much. If you would like to write to us,
(29:49):
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about today, or almost anything else, you go to our
(30:10):
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(30:30):
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Start
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from hot
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today we
are talking about a topic that was requested on Twitter
by listener carsa uh and it is Contraband camps. And
(00:24):
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
(00:44):
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 and 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
(01:07):
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. I'm both glad and sad
that we're doing this episode because it's such a difficult topic,
(01:29):
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
to if 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
(01:52):
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
(02:15):
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
(02:40):
to sum that up, if you escape to a free state,
that doesn't mean you're free. So the Fugitive Slaved Act
of see established much more specific ways for that clause
to be enacted. It made provisions for slave owners and
those taking or those acting on their behalves to search
for escape slaves in free states. They had to provide
(03:01):
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 escaped slave. In response, several states enacted
(03:26):
personal liberty laws to circumvent the Fugitive Slave Act of
seventeen ninety three and temperates 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
(03:47):
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
(04:07):
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
(04:28):
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 enslave states because of slaves running to
free states. In eighteen fifty, Congress once again passed legislation
(04:49):
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
(05:10):
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 twelfth, three escaped slaves managed to cross Virginia's
(05:30):
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
(05:52):
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
(06:14):
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
(06:36):
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
(06:57):
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, Shephard, and Mallory back to the rebels.
In the meantime, an officer from the rebel camp, Major
(07:17):
John Baytop Carry, had arrived at the fort to collect
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
(07:40):
he met with Major Carry, 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 at
that point and I was kind of like, yeah, well
(08:02):
and he there isn't There's more back and forth between
the two of them that you'll hear and it is
sort of a like, but you said we couldn't be
a foreign country. The Union isn't accepting our succession. 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
(08:24):
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 we're 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
(08:44):
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
(09:06):
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 slaves 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
(09:26):
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
(09:52):
get back to our story, asked for President Lincoln. He
was really not sure what to do about all these
unit of slave. 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
(10:17):
keeping the strong men to help at the fort 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,
(10:38):
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.
(11:01):
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 Goodhart,
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
(11:24):
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 beat 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
(11:45):
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
(12:08):
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
(12:30):
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
(12:50):
one thing, but they were also really uneasy at the
growing numbers 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
(13:11):
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 expanded 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
(13:32):
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,
(13:53):
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.
(14:17):
And through all of this congressional maneuvering 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, UH,
and they all came to be known as contraband camps.
And as news of each of these laws spread, the
(14:39):
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
(15:01):
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 the Mississippi Valley. Ulysses S.
Grant named a superintendent of contrabands, and that was John Eaton,
(15:24):
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
(15:46):
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 clearing land and construction projects
were also assigned to the refuge he is capable of
and willing to do labor in the camp In Corinth Mississippi,
freedmen were tasked with the work that transition the camp
(16:07):
from a makeshift tent set up to an actual small
town with something of an infrastructure. There were eventually cabins, streets,
a 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,
(16:30):
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
(16:53):
was still never considered a permanent solution. In the eight
sixty four winter, all of the camps res events 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,
(17:14):
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,
(17:35):
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
(17:55):
about that in just a moment, but first we will
take a quick break for a word from us offer.
We've spoken pretty often on our show about how racism
and contradictions to how it's often depicted as not just
a Southern problem, and this was certainly the case in
(18:18):
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
(18:40):
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 them elves, relocated to camps,
(19:02):
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
(19:23):
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 shovel people around, it
(19:46):
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,
(20:07):
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 officials for help
we're 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
(20:30):
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
(20:50):
a lot of places that was not honored either. So
between eighteen sixty three and eighteen sixty six, sixty thousand
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
(21:13):
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,
(21:34):
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
(21:54):
so common amongst freed people. Many of them were still
in contraband camps and the 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,
(22:14):
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
(22:37):
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
(23:00):
or 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
(23:20):
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, more commonly known as the Freedman's Bureau,
(23:43):
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 a War department, and it was
intended to last until the war ended, plus one additional
(24:05):
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 guess work going on
in all of this, and of course there were plenty
(24:26):
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 and 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
(24:49):
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
(25:11):
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
(25:31):
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
(25:54):
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 Contraband
(26:18):
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
(26:38):
of freed people buying property on record, and the Hampton
Camp continues to be a place of interest. Beginning in
two and 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 air. It's try to learn more about
(27:01):
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
(27:24):
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.
(27:44):
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
(28:05):
and perceived by various special interesting groups along the way,
and some people using this 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,
(28:25):
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 do you also also have some
listener mail. I do. And it's not depressing at all,
(28:47):
which is not to say that depressing is bad. That's
important stuff. But I have two pieces of postcard mail.
I'm gonna keep it short since that episode ran a
little bit long. The first one is from our listener Hayden.
And Hayden went to New York City on a birthday
trip and went to the Tenement Museum. One of the
things that's mentioned is finally a historic home that tells
(29:07):
the tale of the working class and not just the
wealthy elite. Uh. And so thank you so much Hayden
for thinking of us and sending us that The Tenement Museum.
You know, we love it. It is awesome. The people
that work there are incredible. Uh. And the second one
is from our listener Lindsay and she uh went to
the South Street Support Museum UH and got us a
(29:28):
trade card by the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which is
kind of this wonderful combination postcard where it shows the
great suspension bit Bridge connecting New York in Brooklyn, but
then it also has have you a Singer sewing machine
on it. It's a kind of weird uh double bill
for a postcard, but I love it, so thank you
very very much. If you would like to write to us,
(29:49):
you can do so at History podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can reach out to us at
Facebook dot com slash mist in History, on Twitter at
mist in History, at pinterest dot com, slash mist in
history at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and
on Instagram at missed in History. If you would like
to research a little bit more about what we talked
about today, or almost anything else, you go to our
(30:10):
parents site, how stuff works dot com, type in something
in the search bar and come up with just an
array of amazing answers anytime you do a search. You
can also visit us at missed in history dot com,
where you'll see the back catalog of every episode of
the podcast that has ever happened, including hosts way way
way before Tracy and I were on the show, and
(30:30):
we have show notes for any of the episodes since
the Tracy and Holly era of stuff you missed in
History class, as well as occasional other goodies. So please
come and visit us online at how stuff works dot
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.