Contraband (American Civil War)

Contraband was a term commonly used in the US military during the American Civil War to describe a new status for certain people who escaped slavery or those who affiliated with Union forces. In August 1861, the Union Army and the US Congress determined that the US would no longer return people who escaped slavery who went to Union lines, but they would be classified as "contraband of war," or captured enemy property. They used many as laborers to support Union efforts and soon began to pay wages.

These self-emancipated freedmen set up camps near Union forces, often with army assistance and supervision. The army helped to support and educate both adults and children among the refugees. Thousands of men from these camps enlisted in the United States Colored Troops when recruitment started in 1863.

One particular contraband camp, which had 6,000 "runaway negroes", was in Natchez, Mississippi, and was visited by General Ulysses S. Grant with some of his family and staff in 1863.^[1]

By the end of the war, more than one hundred contraband camps were operating in the Southern United States, including the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina. In Roanoke Island, approximately 3,500 formerly enslaved people worked to develop a self-sufficient community.

A unique view of a temporary contraband camp, in this case located in the town square of Opelousas, Louisiana from April to May 10, 1863, appears in a report submitted to Louisiana's Confederate governor Henry W. Allen and published 1865. The account was written by a Confederate officer from St. Landry Parish, most likely Gen. John G. Pratt:^[2]

The accomplished officer who presided over the scenes daily enacted in this barracoon was the "Military Governor of Opelousas," Col. Chickering, of the 41st Massachusetts regiment, who occupied the most conspicuous residence, fronting the entrance of the church. From his eligible position he had, as from the royal box at the opera, the most comprehensive view of the scenes passing beneath. Morning and evening, as he promenaded his spacious gallery, in all the glitter of military button and strap, he passed in review the living panorama before him, which was to furnish such valuable acquisitions to the confiscated plantations on the Lafourche and the coast. The scenes which he so complacently surveyed will long live in the memory of the then inhabitants of the town. In one place groups of human beings, with melancholy faces, were crouched on the earth around some decaying embers; in another, men, women and children were moving in some African dance to the discordant chant of a hundred voices; in another, crowds were reclining in listless idleness on the ground, in every attitude that betrays the vacant mind; in another, half clad men and women were feasting and rioting amidst peals and shouts of unearthly merriments; in another, awkward field hands, grotesquely dressed, were being taken through the exercises of squad drill and the manual of arms, while in the midst of all these scenes blue-coated officers and men were seen in amorous dalliance with the colored Aspasias of the town, exhibiting, in their degradation, a contempt for the commonest decencies of life. Nor was the spectacle less humiliating in the church. From its sacred chancel a half-crazy negro, with the voice of a Stentor and the fire of Peter the Hermit, declaimed in a barbaric jargon to an auditory whose appreciation was manifested in wild shouts and screams. The declamation of the preacher, in which the name of God was connected with ideas of heathen superstition, seemed to light up in the minds of his hearers the dormant spark of African barbarism which had smouldered for generations.^[2]

Contraband refugee camps have been described as "simultaneously humanitarian crises and incubators for a new relationship between African Americans and the U.S. government."^[3]