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ISBN 978-0-8078-4918-7

Published: Spring 2001

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Copyright (c) 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In December 1863, several weeks after missionary teacher Elizabeth James arrived on Union-occupied Roanoke Island to commence her work among former slaves, she finally found time to write a letter recounting her experiences. "I can not tell you how busy I am," she related. "Those who are escaping from bondage are pressing in in all directions. From one to two hundred arrive every few days." James was not describing an isolated wartime event. Commencing with the beginning of the war, as soon as the Union army had established a foothold in an area, word spread among local slaves, who then streamed across Union lines hoping to obtain freedom.[1]

Although federal troops never occupied a vast amount of Southern territory, the Union presence was widespread. By May 1861, the federal government had secured its military installations in the District of Columbia and at Fortress Monroe in Virginia. Later that year, in November 1861, federal troops occupied Port Royal, South Carolina. Then in February and March of the following year, the Union military established footholds at various points along the coast of North Carolina. In April, the federal occupation spread to additional South Carolina Sea Islands, some of Georgia's barrier islands, and Fernandina and St. Augustine, Florida, as well as to New Orleans and the area of Louisiana lying between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. By the middle of the summer of 1862, federal forces were also occupying Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Helena, Arkansas; Huntsville, Alabama; Corinth, Mississippi; and other points along major midwestern rivers and railways.[2]

Runaway slaves gathered in makeshift settlements on the periphery of Union encampments, taking refuge wherever they could find a spot, in abandoned buildings or hastily constructed makeshift shelters. Meanwhile, the federal occupation profoundly altered fugitive slave policy. At Fortress Monroe, General Benjamin Butler put the former slaves to work and offered them protection and food. More significantly, he offered them freedom, for he considered the refugees contraband of war and refused to return them to their former owners. Other military authorities followed suit, and the number of slave refugees, termed "contrabands," near Union encampments multiplied more rapidly than the local commanders had anticipated.[3]

By the fall of 1862, military officials were concerned about the "contraband problem." The contraband settlements were beginning to take on a more permanent cast. Local commanders feared that the proximity of the contraband settlements to the Union encampments would affect military discipline. They also realized that the crowded conditions in the contraband camps would create major sanitation problems that would have an impact on the Union camps. Officers were appointed to superintend the camps and put the contrabands to work in an organized manner. Within a short time, the various haphazard local policies in the field were superseded by a more unified policy within the War Department. Until the March 1865 creation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, contraband camps came under the direct purview of the Union army's Quartermaster's Department and were supervised by superintendents who were appointed by the general who commanded a particular area.[4]

Most of the contraband superintendents had been serving in the army as chaplains. Many had strong connections to the Northern contraband and freedmen's relief associations that were providing substantial aid to former slaves in various Southern locales. Consequently, most of the superintendents entered their jobs with the sincere desire that the camps would be more than safe refuges for the former slaves. They hoped that camp life would assist the former slaves as they made the transition to freedom. The superintendents, however, remained subordinate to regular army officers, and they were well aware that the camps existed first and foremost as a consequence of military exigencies. Some local military officials had great sympathy and respect for contrabands and contraband camps, while others only tolerated them because they knew that keeping the former slaves under Union protection prevented their use by the Confederacy. As the war progressed, the term "contraband" was frequently supplanted by "freedmen" in official military correspondence, but the treatment that some of the former slaves received at the hands of the military often suggested that these authorities still regarded the former slaves to be property ("contraband") rather than free persons.[5]

When the Civil War opened, there were approximately four million slaves in the South. Four years later, close to a half million of the former slaves were living in areas held by federal forces; many of them lived in the government-supervised contraband/freedmen camps. No one has attempted to chronicle all of the settlements, but research coming out of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland suggests that close to a hundred camps had been established by the war's end. They were situated wherever there was a strong Union military occupation in Southern territory—just outside of the District of Columbia, at various points along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, at a number of locations in Kentucky and Tennessee, and up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Cairo, Illinois. Some camps lasted for a few months, while others evolved into settlements that continued into the postwar period.[6]

In the deep South, the former slaves were more likely to stay on or near the plantations where they had been enslaved; this was especially true in those areas where Union forces directly occupied the plantations. In the upper South and the border states, contrabands usually gathered in camps that were near Union outposts in occupied towns or villages. By 1864, military authorities had also established some camps in hopes of removing the refugees from the proximity of Union encampments or relieving crowded conditions in some occupied areas. Some of these camps were found in the vicinity of the District of Columbia and in various places in the Mississippi Valley and southern Louisiana. Although a few of the latter in Louisiana were called freedmen's home colonies or freedmen's labor colonies, they were, in practice, bleak temporary camps that aided the Union military in controlling the refugee situation and putting together gangs of black laborers. They were not meant to be permanent.[7]

Most slaves fled their homes with no inkling of the wretched and chaotic conditions that awaited them in their first days in the contraband camps. They just knew that however bad things got to be, they were never as bad as living in slavery. And so they continued to come, in large groups and small; day after day, the roads and paths in the countryside near Union encampments swelled with trains of weary but jubilant migrants in search of better lives. Some arrived in the camps with wagons, tools, animals, bundles of clothes, and small personal articles; while countless others brought nothing but the clothing on their backs. Likewise, they came with a variety of backgrounds and skills. Some had served as house servants, skilled laborers, and managers; while others escaped from backbreaking work as field hands and common laborers. More than half the refugees were children or old folks, dependent on family or friends.

As soon as it appeared that the military had a firm hold on an area and the contraband camp that was developing there was fairly secure, the former slaves' first impetus was to attempt to gather their scattered family members together and then to exercise their freedom by creating their own churches and schools. Many of the men and some of the women found jobs working for the military. Often the men worked for the Quartermaster's Department as teamsters or common laborers, digging ditches or building fortifications, docks, and roads. Meanwhile, some of the women served as cooks, laundresses, and maids for officers and soldiers; and a few found jobs as nurses or attendants in the primitive army hospitals. The type of work varied with the camps' locations.

Frequently the work was not much different in kind from the sort of servile labor the former slaves had left when they fled from bondage, and often the jobs were dangerous—the sort that enlisted white soldiers did not relish. The significant difference from slavery was that the contrabands were supposed to be paid for their labor. Usually, however, they did not receive all of their wages in cash. The policy varied slightly from commander to commander, but often money for support of those who were unable to work was subtracted from the wages of those who were working. Similarly, clothing and government food rations counted against their earnings. Generally at least a fourth of the contrabands in a camp subsisted on rations, and that number increased after the early summer of 1863, when the Union army began recruiting the able-bodied black men to serve as soldiers, leaving the women, children, elderly, and unfit behind in the camps.[8]

There was no single model for the contraband camps; each camp evolved in its local context. The contraband camps on South Carolina's Sea Islands were typical of those in areas of the deep South where large plantations were common. In November 1861, soon after the establishment of the Union occupation in the area, General Thomas W. Sherman set up temporary camps at Beaufort (Port Royal Island) and Hilton Head (Hilton Head Island) for former slaves. Generally, these camps attracted blacks who were fleeing from the South Carolina mainland or other areas outside of Union lines, while contrabands who had been slaves on the island plantations remained where they had been. The two hundred or so plantations under Union control soon became the focus of a great amount of Northern benevolent activities and a grand experiment in free labor. More precisely, Northern reformers sought to replace slavery with a system of free labor involving the former slaves. The goal was a scheme that was both fair to the workers and profitable for Northern overseers.

The contraband camps, meanwhile, remained mere adjuncts to the plantations. The men in the camps found jobs working for the army's Quartermaster, Engineer, and Subsistence Departments. General Sherman paid the laborers and issued rations to those who could not work. Camp life, however, was not pleasant; most of the men did not stay in the camps very long, preferring instead to move in with friends or relatives on the plantations. By early 1862, a majority of the residents who were crowded together in the camps on the Sea Islands were women, children, and the elderly.[9]

A slightly different system of contraband camps developed in the Mississippi Valley, where local commanders had a great deal of latitude in setting everyday policy. In some places the able-bodied men found jobs with the military, and local military authorities provided housing and food for their dependents in the camps. In other places, government overseers put the men from the camps to work building military defenses, or harvesting cotton on farms that belonged to white resident owners who reimbursed the government for the labor, or on farms that had been abandoned. Conditions in many cases were not much better for these men than they had been under slavery. The men received little or nothing for their labors, coupled with promises of wages at the end of the war. Meanwhile, their families languished in camps that were little more than holding areas, and the small amount of personal property that some had possessed upon entering the camps was frequently seized by federal quartermasters for military use. General Ulysses S. Grant had also relocated some freedpeople who were within Union lines in the Mississippi Valley to "contraband retreats," temporary settlements that he had established for the families of men who were working for one of the military's departments. Most of these midwestern camps were also dismal gatherings of former slaves who were waiting for better times.[10]

An exception that illustrated what could be accomplished at a contraband retreat was the camp at Corinth, Mississippi, which was founded in the fall of 1862. Under the supervision of Chaplain James M. Alexander of the 66th Illinois Volunteers, the Corinth camp blossomed. The freedmen laid out streets and built houses, a school, a church, a commissary, and a hospital. By May 1863, Alexander had organized a nearly complete regiment of black troops from the camp. Meanwhile, the soldiers' families who remained in the camp cooperatively farmed four hundred acres of land, three hundred in cotton, and one hundred in vegetables. In the summer of 1863, John Eaton, General Grant's superintendent of freedmen, estimated that the camp was making a monthly profit of $4,000 to $5,000. Despite its initial success, however, the camp was short-lived. In January 1864, in preparation for his winter campaign in the Mississippi Valley, General William T. Sherman recalled the troops that had been garrisoned at Corinth and ordered the residents of the contraband camp to be evacuated and moved northwest to the area around Memphis, Tennessee. By late January most of the camp's residents had completed the ninety-three-mile trip and were crowded into a foul improvised camp with seven hundred other contrabands in an orchard and cornfield two miles south of Memphis.[11]

After Corinth there were only a few attempts at large-scale cooperative farming experiments associated with freedmen's camps in the Mississippi Valley. One that proved to be successful, at least in the short run, was the Davis Bend plantation experiment. Initially General Grant had declared that he wanted the abandoned lands at Davis Bend, Mississippi, to become a "negro paradise." The area included the plantations of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph, as well as many belonging to a number of other very wealthy Southerners. The contraband population consisted of former slaves from the plantations, as well as thousands who had fled to several wretched camps in the area. After a shaky start and a couple of reversals, the military authorities leased two thousand acres to seventy freedmen who managed, with the help of their families and despite an infestation of army worms, to make a profit on cotton in 1864. Plans for an expansion of the experiment were in place when the war ended. The seventy lessees were, however, but a fraction of the number of people—well over three thousand—who were crowded into the contraband camps in the Davis Bend area. Although the experiment at Davis Bend differed from what was being conducted on the Sea Islands, the relationship of the contraband camps to the plantations was similar. The camps existed alongside but peripheral to the plantations.[12]

A similar relationship between camps and farms existed in Union-occupied southeastern Virginia, where a slightly different model of cooperative farming prevailed. Former slaves started streaming into areas that were under federal control in May 1861 and did not stop until war's end. By May of 1863, military authorities had turned close to fifty abandoned properties near Hampton and Norfolk, including the plantation of former President John Tyler, into government farms. Men with families or groups of men who had been congregating at army posts or in temporary contraband camps were resettled and assigned plots on the farms. Most of these former slaves worked the farms, under the supervision of a white overseer, for a share—a third or half—of the crop; but a few rented small plots and farmed without close supervision. The result was not an effective solution to the contraband problem. While some of the former slaves ended up on well-run farms, many faced great obstacles, including food and fuel shortages, and even the possibility of being kidnapped. More importantly, around five thousand of the most destitute refugees—the women and children—remained in crowded camps, dependent on government aid.[13]

In many respects the contraband camps in and around the District of Columbia were similar to those that were established in Virginia's tidewater, yet there were also significant differences. The camps in the District of Columbia were established in a context that was shaped by the significant presence of the federal government and a tradition of free blacks laboring for the federal government. Prior to the opening of the war, the District had been home to approximately fifteen thousand blacks, of which around three thousand were slaves. Once the war opened, hundreds of slaves fled from Maryland and Virginia to the city in hopes of obtaining freedom. Initially the military authorities did not recognize the contraband status of the slaves from loyal Maryland, opting to return the fugitives; but many of the Maryland slaves found ways to circumvent that obstacle, and the stream of runaways continued unabated. Meanwhile, the federal government needed thousands of additional laborers, especially in the Quartermaster's and Engineer's Departments, to maintain the war effort, so there were plenty of jobs for the contrabands.[14]

The main problem that the newcomers faced was procuring housing. Many preferred finding lodging with friends in various shanty settlements around the city, but that was not always a realistic possibility. General Joseph K. F. Mansfield, commander of the Department of Washington, sent many of the new arrivals to a camp that had been organized at the Old Capitol Prison. The camp's superintendent found them jobs working for the military or private employers. When that location proved unsatisfactory, in part because some whites objected to housing the former slaves near white prisoners, the contrabands were moved to an area of tenements east of the Capitol known as Duff Green's Row. Representatives of several freedmen's relief associations provided aid to the residents and initiated some educational efforts as well. After Congress officially abolished slavery within the District in April 1862, the steady stream of former slaves pouring into the city turned into a torrent, leading to a great deal of crowding. An outbreak of smallpox at Duff Green's Row in July prompted the superintendent to relocate the former slaves housed there to some vacated army barracks and stables. The resulting contraband camp was known as Camp Barker.[15]

Conditions at Camp Barker were dreary, to say the least. Living quarters were cramped, and there was little privacy. The superintendent, Danforth B. Nichols, a Methodist minister, had scant relief to dispense to the contrabands, and his harsh manner made him few friends among the former slaves. The contrabands were, in fact, eager to secure jobs so that they could move their families out of the camp. Most of the men found it easy to procure jobs with the military, while many of the women found positions in households. The women who were unable to find work, especially women with small children, as well as the elderly and sick, were left behind. In December 1863, around 685 of the estimated 15,000 contrabands who had entered Camp Barker since it opened remained there. They were ordered to move across the Potomac to Freedmen's Village, a camp that had been created in Arlington, Virginia, on the abandoned estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Custis Lee.[16]

In contrast to Camp Barker, Freedmen's Village seemed a veritable paradise. Located near approximately 1,300 acres of government farms, the small cabins that were laid out on streets in the village each offered room enough for two families, plus there was land for gardens. In addition, there was a school, a chapel, a hospital, and workshops that offered the young men and women training in skilled trades. The government farms and Freedmen's Village had been created by Colonel Elias M. Greene, chief quartermaster of the Department of Washington, who was a tireless supporter and promoter of the project. He assumed that most of the residents would work for wages and leave the village once they had acquired enough training to support themselves. In reality, however, most of the able-bodied men had either enlisted in the Union army or found jobs in the District working for the government. By late September 1863, only 150 of the 900 residents were classified as healthy men; Freedmen's Village was primarily a haven for women and children, old folks, and the poor. Nevertheless, the freedpeople in the village attempted to sustain themselves, many through work on the nearby government farms. Those who could afford to do so paid monthly rents of one to three dollars for housing. Meanwhile, the needy poor in the village were supported by a contraband fund that was financed through taxes on black laborers in the District and northern Virginia. Instead of staying for a short time, as Colonel Greene had envisioned, many of the residents grew so comfortable in the village that they settled in for the long term.[17]

Even a cursory overview of contraband camps suggests that life in most of the camps was very unsettled, and dependence on government support was not unusual. Many of the residents were not able to work, and the ones who did work were not always paid fairly or regularly. Consequently, a majority of the contrabands throughout the South relied to some extent on government rations and the donations of the various freedmen's relief associations. By war's end, these organizations, the outgrowth of abolitionist sentiment in the North, had gathered and shipped hundreds of barrels of clothing, household supplies and hardware, medical supplies, Bibles, and books to be distributed in the Southern contraband camps. The freedmen superintendents coordinated the distribution of rations and donated materials and served generally as a bridge between the relief associations and the contrabands. The relief societies also sponsored much of the day-to-day educational and relief work in the camps—work that was conducted by a passionate group of Northern missionary teachers. Most of the teachers had strong abolitionist leanings. Many were deeply religious, infused with the evangelical Christianity that had played a significant role in Northern society since the Second Great Awakening. They were motivated by their belief that they had been called South to save both the bodies and the souls of the former slaves.

In the past twenty years, historians have shown a great deal of interest in Northern relief work in the Southern freedmen camps, resulting in some ground-breaking publications that establish a framework for understanding the missionary and educational work among the freedpeople. These historians suggest insights into the motivations of the missionary teachers and shed light on the successes and failures of their educational and benevolent aims. One thing that most of the studies have touched on was the role of Northern evangelicalism in establishing the moral environment that propelled thousands of men and women to come to the South as missionaries to the freedmen. With adherents among Baptists, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, Methodists, and Presbyterians, evangelicalism dominated the religious outlook in the North in the years leading up to the war. Historians have begun to realize that this group of well-educated and well-connected Christians had an influence on Northern culture and politics that extended well beyond their numbers.[18]

In contrast to their Calvinist ancestors, who focused on original sin, predestination, and atonement, Northern Protestant evangelicals emphasized the possibility that society and individuals could be perfected. Consequently, they were in the forefront of a number of antebellum social movements, including temperance and free schools, but especially abolition. Northern evangelical Christians were outspoken against slavery, and their antislavery arguments prompted many other Northerners to take up the abolitionist cause. Ever since the Second Great Awakening, Northern evangelicals had been especially active in proclaiming that the coming of Christ's millennial kingdom, which had been prophesied in the Book of Revelation, was at hand, and that it would occur in the United States. They believed that the sin of slaveholding was, however, preventing the coming of the millennium; slavery had to be eradicated before society could be perfected and Christ would return to earth. Invoking millennial imagery, they first worked at home to convince their neighbors and political leaders that it was not a question of fighting for either Union or emancipation: emancipation was a necessary first step toward the purified Union that was a prerequisite for the establishment of the millennium. Then, when given a chance, the Northern evangelicals went South to work among the former slaves to rectify the damage caused by slavery.[19]

The evangelical Christians were not, however, mere religious fanatics who were so swept up in millennial fever that they lost touch with the secular world. Overall they tended to be traditional republicans in outlook; they assumed that human beings made choices for which they should be held responsible and that hard work would lead to rewards, both material and spiritual. Generally, the evangelicals were, in fact, very successful in business and industry. Most advocated a laissez-faire philosophy with respect to the role of government in everyday life; they believed, for example, that extending government aid to the poor would discourage industry and prolong their poverty. At the same time, they believed that all human beings should have the right to the profits of their own labor, as well as the right to own personal and real property.[20]

While women were noticeably absent from their philosophical discussions, most Northern evangelicals did advocate equal political rights for all men, white and black. They did not, however, believe in the social equality of whites and blacks, nor did they assume that "equality before the law" would lead to social equality. In other words, they were not egalitarians; they thought that ultimately the former slaves would find their "natural" social position, which would likely be somewhere near the bottom of society. At times, in fact, their actions often manifested a racism that now seems curiously out of step with their antislavery sentiments, but which (however repulsive) makes some sense in light of the distinction they made between political and social equality.[21]

Studying the missionary work among freedmen in North Carolina provides a great opportunity to gain greater insight into what the Northern evangelicals wished to accomplish in their Southern missionary endeavors, partly because of the extensive untapped primary sources and also because of the role played by the superintendent of freedmen affairs, the Reverend Horace James, an evangelical Congregational minister from Worcester, Massachusetts. An abolitionist who advocated traditional republican values and supported many of the ideas championed by the Radical Republicans, James remained in close contact with other Northern Christian evangelicals, including the leaders of the American Missionary Association, one of the major organizations involved in relief work among the Southern freedmen. Although James was not an original thinker—most of his ideas mirrored those that were held by his fellow evangelicals—he was a prolific writer of letters, many of which included discussions of putting his beliefs into practice in the South.

In North Carolina Horace James found a widespread and frequently turbulent mission field. Once Union forces had taken control of several areas of coastal North Carolina, slaves began streaming into the occupied territory in hopes of finding sanctuary. By midsummer 1862, more than 10,000 contrabands were living in Union-occupied areas. By January 1864, the number had nearly doubled; 17,419 former slaves were living within Union lines in eastern North Carolina: 2,426 at Beaufort, 89 at Hatteras, 8,591 at New Bern, 860 at Plymouth, 2,712 on Roanoke Island, and 2,741 at Washington. From that point until the end of the war, the population of North Carolina's contraband settlements stabilized at a number that approached 18,000.[22]

Although James would have preferred for the former slaves to have been spread out on government-sponsored farms, he had reluctantly concluded that contraband camps were necessary in North Carolina because the amount of land that the Union occupied was very small. The Union controlled "a broad area of navigable waters," but there was "scarcely room enough on land to spread our tents upon," he complained. If land had been available in the state for the former slaves, James noted, "it would have prevented huddling them together in the fortified towns and temporary camps. But there was left to us no alternative."[23]

During his tenure in North Carolina, Horace James supervised freedmen camps at Beaufort, New Bern, Plymouth, Roanoke Island, and Washington. Not all camps survived the war; wartime conditions led to some disruptive movements of contrabands from camp to camp, and the demise of some camps. During the Confederate attack on Plymouth in April 1864, for example, most of the freedmen in that camp were evacuated to Beaufort, New Bern, or Roanoke Island. Later that month, Washington was similarly threatened, and most of the freedmen there were evacuated to New Bern. By January 1865, a majority of the freedmen in North Carolina lived in three areas: 3,245 in Beaufort and vicinity, 10,782 in New Bern and vicinity, and 3,091 on Roanoke Island.[24]

James's headquarters were in New Bern, which also served as Union military headquarters for eastern North Carolina. Throughout the war, New Bern remained home to the state's largest population of freedpeople, whose numbers alone presented tremendous housing and sanitation problems to James's office. The majority of the population, 6,560, lived in town, and another 1,424 lived on its outskirts. The remainder lived in three contraband camps outside of town, but two of these camps were abandoned after a Confederate attack in January 1864. After that, the residents of all three camps were combined into one, the Trent River camp, which was about a mile and half south of town at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent Rivers. James and his men laid out a freedmen's village there. They created streets and divided the approximately thirty acres of land into lots that were, he recounted, "fifty by sixty, allowing a little garden spot to each house." Initially 2,798 freedmen lived in the village, which consisted of eight hundred cabins, mostly rough-hewn out of boards that had been split by hand.[25]

Conditions were primitive, and life was difficult for the early inhabitants of Trent River. The residents, however, persevered, and James wrote proudly of the conditions in the camp, whose name was later changed to James City in his honor. "If we must have camps, or African villages, in which temporarily to shelter and feed refugees from bondage," James declared, "this settlement, located healthfully on the banks of the Trent, is a model for imitation." The freedmen, James noted after the war, had turned what "was started as a temporary camp, in which to place colored fugitives and give them food and protection, while the country was disturbed by war," into a "self-supporting" settlement. Its inhabitants worked hard to obtain permanent title to the land they were renting. The community remained viable until 1893, when residents lost a court battle to obtain permanent land ownership, and many moved just south of the camp to a community that is still known as James City.[26]

Ironically, the Trent River/James City camp was never intended to be a permanent settlement. That distinction fell to the Roanoke Island camp, the first contraband camp to be established in North Carolina and the only one in the state that was given the official designation of "colony." That alone might be enough reason to justify a thorough study of the freedmen work on Roanoke Island, but there are other reasons related to the nature of the freedmen experiment that was conducted there. In contrast to South Carolina's Sea Islands, where the military commanded a vast area of land in the form of plantations, or Virginia's Hampton Roads area, where the government controlled a number of farms, the Roanoke Island settlement was not subsidiary to a larger agricultural experiment. At its establishment the authorities hoped that the Roanoke Island freedmen's colony would be a self-contained settlement supporting itself through a combination of domestic manufactures and small-scale agriculture. Likewise, in contrast to the "home colonies" and "labor colonies" in the Mississippi Valley, which were organized as holding centers and which, with the exception of a few camps such as the one at Corinth, were managed with little hope of permanence, the colony on Roanoke Island was established with an eye to the future. While it was a sanctuary for the families of freedmen soldiers, its organizers had grander hopes for what could be accomplished there.[27]

Although there had been a contraband camp on Roanoke Island since the battle in February 1862, in the spring of 1863, General John G. Foster instigated efforts to create a government-sanctioned settlement there. More specifically, Foster ordered Horace James "to establish a colony of negroes upon Roanoke Island." In James's mind, there was an important distinction between a camp and a colony: a camp provided a safe temporary haven for former slaves, while a colony offered the opportunity to mold a permanent community. Proposals to establish colonies of former slaves in places such as Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America had been around since the early part of the nineteenth century. The American Colonization Society was founded in 1817 to promote such activity. What was new during the war period was the serious contemplation of colonization within the United States. In September 1862, for example, General Ulysses S. Grant had proposed that contrabands be transported from Union camps in the Mississippi Valley to Cairo, Illinois, where his command had made arrangements for them to work for civilians. Back in Virginia that same fall, General John A. Dix had sent inquiries to the governors of several Northern states asking that they take in some of the contrabands who had gathered at Fortress Monroe. Both proposals, however, had eventually fallen flat in the face of protest in the free states. Democrats had used the threat of a mass black emigration to whip up support in Northern elections, while Republicans feared that government backing of such proposals would diminish support for the war effort.[28]

Most likely James knew of the uproar created by some of the early proposals to remove the former slaves from the South. Similarly, he probably knew that the word "colony" had been applied in New Orleans and other areas to what were, in reality, squalid makeshift refugee camps. In June 1863, when James crafted a letter for publication in Northern newspapers soliciting support from friends for the creation of a colony on Roanoke Island for the "families of colored soldiers," he made it clear that his plans for the former slaves did not involve colonization in another state or country. He also emphasized that his colony would not be a mere holding place for the freedpeople. James noted that General Foster had selected Roanoke Island as the location of the colony because it was safe and had a variety of natural resources. James believed that the colonists would be able to support themselves through a variety of agricultural, fishing, and manufacturing ventures. Just as important, he looked forward to the time when the colonists would be independent and self-sufficient freeholders. James and his assistants laid out what amounted to a New England-style village on the north end of the island. He assigned the lots to freedmen families, who immediately began to erect homes and cultivate gardens. On several occasions, James indicated that he assumed that the freedmen soldiers would return to the island after the war and continue to live there with their families in the village. They would be proud freeholders in control of their own labors.[29]

It is impossible to know how much of James's discussion of his goals for the colony on Roanoke Island was intended merely for public consumption in the North. He worked diligently to rouse Northern support for the missionary work among the freedpeople; and Roanoke Island, with its historic connections, provided an excellent backdrop for his appeals. At the same time, it is hard to resist the conclusion that, at least for the first couple of years of his work, James got swept up in contemplating the possibility that the settlement on Roanoke Island could be much more than a mere camp. The utopian overtones to James's thoughts were motivated by a complex combination of evangelical and traditional republican beliefs. On several occasions, James, for example, emphasized the contrast between what the freedmen were attempting on Roanoke Island and what had been attempted there three centuries earlier in Sir Walter Raleigh's colony. In particular, he contrasted the socially progressive goals of the freedmen's colony with the materialistic goals of Raleigh's failed "lost colony." James was thinking beyond the war to the society that he hoped to see in a South that was purged of the "sin of slavery." He believed that Roanoke Island offered a chance for an important social experiment—a chance to create what he termed a "New Social Order" in which white and black citizens would live and work together. The Roanoke Island freedmen's colony would be a place to showcase his ideas about free labor, landholding, and self-sufficiency. More importantly, he thought that it would be a model for emulation throughout the South.[30]

James, as the story will show, was a complex individual who is not easily measured by a twentieth-century yardstick. Like many of his fellow evangelicals, he did not believe in social equality between the races. Yet he abhorred slavery and dedicated a number of years of his life to improving the lot of freedmen. Although he identified himself as a republican (with a small "r"), rather than a member of the Republican party, there were times when his ideas seemed to be as radical as those of any of the Radical Republicans in Congress. He was idealistic, but he did not hesitate to turn very quickly from methods that were not proving effective. He was suffused with enthusiasm and theoretical notions, but he thrived on details and lacked a sense of the big picture. His mind took delight in the contemplation of a "New Social Order," but he failed to anticipate what that would really mean in the destitute conditions of the postwar South.[31]

In the short run, however, work in the colony presented James and the Northern missionaries who labored there what they considered a grand opportunity to put into practice ideas about abolition and evangelicalism that had been simmering in the North for more than forty years. In company with James, most of the missionaries felt that they had been "called" to the Southern mission field—that they had a moral duty to serve the unfortunate and convert souls to evangelical Christianity. Roanoke Island provided a challenging real-life backdrop for their work. The missionaries came South firmly believing that education and religion could erase the damage suffered under slavery and prepare the freedpeople for citizenship. Although the missionary teachers were among the first to acknowledge that the former slaves would not succeed unless they had some land of their own and regular wage-paying jobs, they never lost this faith in the power of education and religion. The missionaries believed, in fact, that a significant part of their job was to change their students. The metaphor that they employed most frequently to describe their work—bringing the former slaves from darkness to the light—pertained equally to their scholarly and spiritual endeavors. The negative consequence of the missionaries' belief in the total rightness of what they were doing is that they failed to recognize that the freedpeople had any cultural heritage of their own. Instead, they sought to impose their own very prescribed ideas about religion and morality.

The freedmen were not, however, mere passive observers. Long before the arrival of the missionaries, contrabands had established a community on the island on the outskirts of the Union encampment. They had organized a school and had built churches. Throughout the history of the colony, the freedpeople came as families and worked hard to maintain family units. Once they had gathered their bearings, they set about to move from the dirty barracks that served as a reception area for new arrivals to the village that Horace James and his assistants had created. They cleared land and built homes. Many of the men took jobs working for the army's Quartermaster's Department, building docks and fortifications or carrying out arduous labor that the enlisted white soldiers on the island resisted. Meanwhile, many of the women found employment working for officers and soldiers. Once it was established that black men would be allowed to serve in the Union army, many of the men in the freedmen's colony enlisted so that they could go fight for their and their families' freedom. Although many of the freedpeople who remained in the colony grew dependent upon government assistance and looked up to the mission teachers, whose schools they packed, they did not give up their autonomy. They maintained their own churches and a few of their own schools, they joined together to complain about conditions in the colony, and they played a significant role in exposing military improprieties on the island.

Although the colony had been established by military orders, the local military authorities provided the greatest obstacles to the day-to-day existence of the colony. Many of the soldiers had no interest in improving the lives of the former slaves, and some openly mistreated them. Likewise, while the military authorities depended on the missionaries to provide a variety of services to the colony, the relationship was not one of reciprocity. The army provided transportation and rations, and the Quartermaster's Department helped to build and maintain the missionaries' schools and homes. The officers could also cut rations or order the missionaries out of buildings or away from the island if war conditions demanded it. Things did not improve with the transfer of freedmen's care to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, whose officers were much more interested in removing the freedmen from the island in the postwar period than in helping to salvage the colony. A grand experiment in social reform was the last thing on their minds.

During its heyday, however, more than a few people thought that Roanoke Island might, at the very least, be the site of a successful colony. Apparently many in the North agreed, and the press eagerly followed the activities on the island, reporting on the colony's struggles and accomplishments. Some seemed especially fascinated that the freedmen's colony was located on the island that had been the home of the first English colony in America. In 1864, for example, Edward Everett Hale wrote an article for the American Antiquarian Society in which he discussed the early colonial experiment and noted with some interest that the "Government of the United States [had] selected the same island for the first colony planted under its own formal protection and direction." The second annual report of the New England Freedmen's Aid Society was even more exuberant. It declared the Roanoke colony "one of the most important and one of the best managed, experiments" that had "been undertaken in behalf of the negroes."[32]

Given its national prominence in the 1860s, the absence of a thorough, published treatment of the freedmen's colony is surprising. The time is truly ripe for an exploration of the Roanoke Island experiment. Evangelical doctrines played an important role in establishing the moral foundation for Reconstruction, and Northern evangelicals attempted to carry out these doctrines in their work among the freedpeople during wartime and the postwar period. In the Roanoke Island experiment, Northern evangelicalism intertwined with a traditional middle-class republicanism that advocated education, self-sufficiency, and freeholding, and encouraged the development of small-scale domestic manufacturing and a laissez-faire economy. A study of the Roanoke Island freedmen's colony presents an opportunity to come to a better understanding of the limitations of the practical application of some evangelical doctrines in a social experiment that predated, yet anticipated, Reconstruction. In some respects the freedmen's colony was, as historian Raymond Gavins has suggested, a "dress rehearsal for Reconstruction."[33]

The remaining chapters of this book present a fairly straightforward narrative history of the establishment and growth of the freedmen's colony on Roanoke Island, from its initiation as a camp shortly after the Battle of Roanoke Island, in February 1862, to its development as a model colony, and finally, to its demise under the auspices of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1867. The book highlights the overlapping roles, and frequently conflicting expectations, of the military authorities, philanthropic organizations, missionary teachers, and former slaves who were major stakeholders in the freedmen's colony. Although most of the players in the drama that unfolded on the island from 1862 to 1867 were not aware that they were part of a dress rehearsal, their story aptly presaged many of the trials of Reconstruction. It is time to tell that story.