"A Rare
of Philological
"Contraband"
Phenomenon
The Word
Vegetation":
of Emancipation
and theMeanings
the United
States
in
Masur
Kate
In his 1888 history of black military service during the Civil War, the African Ameri
can historian
reminded readers that early in thewar, the
George Washington Williams
Union general Benjamin F. Butler had made the "startling and revolutionary" decision to
narrated a story of
label slaves fleeing toUnion army lines "contraband ofwar." Williams
a
was already
on the
staple of histories
legendary and remains
policy making
ground that
of theCivil War. In lateMay 1861, justweeks after thewar began, three enslaved men es
toUnion-occupied
Fortress Monroe, on the central coast ofVirginia. Their owner,
caped
a Confederate colonel, had planned to send them south to labor for the Confederacy and
soon
ordered
an
to collect
aide
them.
Butler,
at
commander
the
fort, was
to
reluctant
return such valuable resources to the Rebels and recognized that themen's labor might
serve theUnion cause. But itwas difficult to justify retaining themen against their own
er'swill. At this early stage in thewar, theUnited States government was wary of confis
to emancipating slaves. Butler improvised. He
cating Confederate property and opposed
declared themen "contraband of war," a move that provided a legal veneer for holding
the men
and
avoided
their
challenging
status
as
property.
"There
was
considerable
com
in the press, in the pulpit, and in political as well as military circles,"Williams
wrote. And yet, he concluded, Butler's policy of holding human beings as contraband?a
almost before
policy that left unchallenged the "false idea" of human property?"died
ment
the country
was
certain
it ever
had
official
countenance."1
The federal government never nationalized Butler's "contraband" policy; laws and ex
ecutive orders quickly superseded his declaration. Yet as a name for fleeing slaves, "con
estimate and beyond anything Butler could
traband" had significance beyond Williams's
to
theUnion war effort,weakening the Con
have predicted. Such slaves became critical
information and labor power.
federacy by their flight and offering the Union valuable
On battlefields and navy ships and in all manner of correspondence, those fugitives be
came "contrabands" in the parlance of military officials. Even more intriguing, the term
into popular culture. Refugees from slaverywere portrayed as con
jumped immediately
is an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University.
Kate Masur
Adam Rothman, Peter Slevin, and the JAHs
Aims McGuinness,
I am grateful to Ira Berlin, Nancy MacLean,
editors and anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to the myriad other friends and
with me. Support for this research was provided by the Library of Con
colleagues who have discussed contrabands
I am indebted to theKluge Center staff and the library's special searchers for helping
Center.
W
John
Kluge
gress's
make the library's remarkable collections accessible, to the spring 2005 Kluge fellows for their interest and engage
to
Wilkes
for research assistance.
Sarah
and
ment,
1
George Washington
1969), 70-72.
Williams,
A History of theNegro Troops in theWar of theRebellion,
1861-1865
(1888; New
York,
1050The Journal ofAmerican History
March
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
2007
"Contraband" and theMeanings
TheWord
of Emancipation
1051
trabands by minstrel performers, on collectible postcards, in cartoons, drawings, and oil
to
paintings, and in publications ranging from theDemocratic humor weekly Vanity Fair
the abolitionist National Anti-Slavery Standard. "Never was a word so speedily adopted by
somany
a
wrote theNew York lawyer and army officerCharles
people in so short time,"
in
Nott
1862.
The
word
late
Cooper
"leaped instantaneously to its new place, jostling
aside the circumlocution colored people,' the extrajudicial persons of African descent,'
the scientific negro,' the slang nigger,' and the debasing 'slave.'" As Nott recognized,
was
"contraband"
a new
and
to the
addition
noteworthy
race and servitude in theUnited
already
extensive
of
vocabulary
States. He predicted that "those who love to ponder over
the changes of language and watch its new uses and unconscious growth, must find in it
a rare
phenomenon of philological vegetation."2
The "rare phenomenon" observed by Nott?the
sudden explosion of "contraband"
into popular culture?reflected Northern preoccupation with the meanings of emanci
pation and the future status of African Americans in theUnited States. As Nott and his
contemporaries realized, people could choose among a range of words to refer to people
of African descent, and different terms implied different views about black citizenship,
dignity, and identity.The choice of the term "contraband" and themyriad ways people
imagined the "contrabands" tellmuch about how Northerners, black and white, sought
to make sense of the prospect of emancipation. Most
fundamentally, the new usage of
"contraband"
signaled
the nation
that
was
at a crossroads.
In
the absence
priate designations for fleeing slaves, the termwas a placeholder whose
once
it became
clear
that
the war
would
secure
permanent
of other
appro
appeal would
Because
emancipation.
fade
"con
traband" had long been used to describe property, the term also implied the transitional
status of the
towhom it referred.They were neither property with a clear owner
people
nor
in
free
(as
slavery)
people, but something in between. Some contemporaries debated
and discussed the term itself:what it signified, whether and how to use it, and for how
long. More often, however, people adopted it unselfconsciously and used it to express
their
own
views
on
emancipation
or on
the
character,
needs,
and
desires
of
the nascent
freedpeople.
one
Following both Nott and the cultural historian Raymond Williams,
might say that
contraband is a "keyword" in the history of emancipation, race, and citizenship in the
United States.Williams
argued that themultiple meanings of a keyword are "inextricably
bound up with the problems it [is] being used to discuss."3 Similarly, themeanings and
connotations
ascribed
to the
term
"contraband"
were
inseparable
from
the questions
pro
spective emancipation forced Northerners to address, and they thus shed light on those
questions. "Contraband" became a crucial term in the Northern debate over whether
escapees from slaverywere citizens in embryo or a threat to the Republic, whether they
deserved respect, pity, or proscription. For Northern African Americans, the term also
provided a new way of talking about difference, of defining their relationship to those
just liberated from bondage.
2
[Charles Cooper Nott], The Coming Contraband: A Reason against theEmancipation Proclamation, not given by
Mr. Justice Curtis, towhom it is addressed,
an
by
Officer in theField (New York, 1862), 2-3.
3
Ibid., 2; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary ofCulture and Society (London, 1976), 13. On the impor
tance of cultural forms in the
and
history of race and racism, see Thomas C. Holt, "Marking: Race, Race-Making,
theWriting of History," American Historical Review, 100 (Feb. 1995), 1-20.
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1052
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
Although Civil War-era Northerners used "contraband" in a novel way, both theword
and the encounter between fleeing slaves and white Northerners were already encum
bered with meanings. In international law, the term "contraband" carried connotations
of property and wartime subterfuge. Applied to escaping slaves during the Civil War, it
called up familiar tropes about enslavement and race, including conventions from min
strelsy and images of both aggressiveness and extreme dependency. Because all contra
bands were fleeing slaves and all enslaved people were understood to be racially "negro,"
the term "contraband" implied racial blackness. As a term for fleeing slaves, it also tended
to connote poverty,
dependence, and desperation. Indeed, even those Northerners with
themost expansive visions of freedom and human equality?white
abolitionists and Afri
can Americans?used
the termwith a degree of condescension or at least an emphasis on
the distinctiveness of former slaves.
Yet the contrabands ofNorthern popular music, literature, and illustration were also
endowed with new ideas born of the ferment of war, including the notion that former
slaves could be soldiers and citizens as well as speculation on the possibilities and implica
tions of their dispersal into theNorth. While overt racism figured in some representations
in the rhetoric of abolitionists or black Northerners?race
of contrabands, inmany?as
was less at issue than the
towhich
people had been subjected as slaves. The
degradation
contrabands of Northerners' imagination also congealed ideas about gender, citizenship,
and the legacies of subjugation. Thus, Northern references to contrabands were not a
simple rhetorical reenslavement. Nor did African Americans reject the term outright.4 To
the contrary,widespread adoption of the term, the debates over it, and its limitations to
gether illuminate the critical Civil War-era debate about the future ofAfrican Americans
and of democracy in theUnited States.
While Butler's canny decision to call escapees "contraband ofwar" is familiar, histori
ans
have
given
little
attention
to
why
and
how
Northerners
adopted
the
term
so
eagerly.
A few recent studies have explored changing representations of African Americans inCivil
War popular culture. But a larger literature on race and racism in Civil War?era
poli
tics and popular culture holds that the period saw few important changes in how white
Americans thought about black people. That literature remains strongly influenced by
on intellectual
Focusing
George M. Frederickson's The Black Image in theWhite Mind.
treatises about race, Frederickson argued that the "Sambo image, rather than being abol
ished with slavery,was merely modified." Following Frederickson, subsequent historians
have emphasized continuity in representations of African Americans across the cataclys
mic Civil War years.5 Yet although theCivil War may not have transformed the science or
4
Alice Fahs has shown that the Civil War, emancipation, and black enlistment generated new conventions for
I take issue with her argument that "the term contraband' caught on
representing African Americans. However,
as property,
a means forNortherners
to continue
it
because
thinking of escaped slaves
provided
rapidly precisely
without disturbing antebellum racist preconceptions" and with Ella Forbes's argument thatAfrican Americans typi
or
Lit
"freedpeople." Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular
cally rejected "contraband," preferring "freedmen"
erature of theNorth and South, 1861-1865
152; Ella Forbes, African American Women during
(Chapel Hill, 2001),
theCivil War (New York, 1998), 9-10.
5
The Debate onAfro-American Character and Desti
George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in theWhite Mind:
in this period, see Fahs,
1817-1914
(New York, 1971), 168. On changing representations of African Americans
ny,
and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homers Images ofBlacks: The Civil War and
Imagined Civil War; Peter H. Wood
Reconstruction Years (Austin, 1988); and Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the
Crisis ofGilded Age America (Berkeley, 2002), 46-57. For treatments of the "contraband" declaration as part of the
or ofAfrican Americans' agency during theCivil War, see Bell IrvinWiley, Southern Negroes,
history of federal policy
TheNegro in theCivil War (1953; New York,
1861-1865
1965), 176-203; Benjamin Quarles,
(1938; New Haven,
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TheWord
pseudoscience
Northern
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1053
of "race," itdid not leave popular perceptions of black people unchanged.
of
representations
reveal
contrabands
an
intense
conversation
about
not
just
themeanings of supposed racial difference but also the repercussions of enslavement, the
and the possibility of a body politic that included former
prospects of black manhood,
slaves as full citizens.
thewar would
The dramatic possibility raised by the escapees at FortressMonroe?that
to
some
to
invite
4
the adop
million
enslaved
of
lead
the emancipation
people?seemed
a
new
term.
innovation
elsewhere
tion of
Prospective emancipation generated linguistic
as well. In the BritishWest Indies and Cuba, for example, governments instituted gradual
names ("apprentice" in theWest Indies; patroci
emancipation policies and coined special
nado inCuba) for the people those policies placed in a liminal position between bondage
and freedom. In theWest Indies, according to the authors of a recent study, "apprentice
ship was,
precisely,
a
metaphor.
It was
a
self-consciously
state
'intermediate'
intended
to
push slaves to acquire the habits of free labourers, and prepare themselves for the enjoy
ment of entire freedom.'"6 In theUnited States, the term "contraband," while similar in
an army at war, not a
signifying transitional status, reflected the ad hoc machinations of
as
in
West
and
the
Indies.
That
Cuba
difference makes the
full-fledged government policy
use of "contraband" in theUnited States all themore notable, for even in the ab
popular
sence
of much
government
encouragement,
Northerners
rushed
From themoment Butler's decision was publicized, Northerners
to infuse "contraband" with meaning.
to
adopt
the new
term.
own battle
joined their
Butler originally applied the term "contraband of war" to fleeing slaves to
a rationale for retaining them without
provide
challenging the concept of human chat
tel. InMarch
1861, in his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln had promised that he
had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interferewith the institution of slavery in the
Benjamin
States where it exists." That May, when the three fugitives arrived at Fortress Monroe,
the
federal government was still pledged to Lincoln's promise. Yet Butler recognized that the
threemale field hands would be "very serviceable" in the Union war effort, and he was
loath to see their labor benefit the Confederacy. Thus, when confronted by their owners'
was entitled to hold themen as property destined for use in
deputy, Butler argued that he
the enemy's war effort.The aide departed without his boss's slaves, and Secretary ofWar
soon
Simon Cameron
approved Butler's decisions to hold the fugitives and to employ
them
as
laborers
in his
quartermaster's
department.7
1989), 57?77; Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband toFreedman: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861?1865
ser. 1, vol. II: TheWartime
(Westport, 1973); Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History ofEmancipation,
Genesis ofFree Labor: The Upper South (New York, 1993), 85-110;
Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary
ser. 1, vol. I: The Destruction
'"This
History ofEmancipation,
ofSlavery (New York, 1985), 59?70; Thavolia Glymph,
in the Civil War,"
inA Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War,
Species of Property': Female Slave Contrabands
and theConfederate Legacy, ed. Edward D. C. Campbell
Jr. and Kym S. Rice (Charlottesville, 1996), 55-71; James
M. McPherson,
Battle Cry ofFreedom: The Civil War Era (1988; New York, 1999), 352-58,
and Allen
497-504;
Guelzo, Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery inAmerica (New York, 2005).
6
Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery:
Explorations ofRace, Labor, and Citi
in Cuba: The
zenship inPostemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, 2000), 20. See Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation
Transition toFree Labor (Princeton, 1985), esp. 123-27; and Thomas C. Holt, The Problem ofFreedom: Race, Labor,
and Politics inJamaica and Britain, 1832-1938
(Baltimore, 1992), esp. 55-112.
7
Abraham Lincoln, "First Inaugural Address," inAbraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Writings
and Speeches, ed. Michael
P. Johnson (New York, 2001),
109; Benjamin F. Butler to Lt. Gen. Winfield
Scott, May
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1054
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
Butler's designation of the fleeing slaves as contraband of war was clever but legally
In international law, the principle of contraband ofwar was part of a doctrine
concerning the rights of neutral parties inwartime. Neutrals could trade with belliger
a
ent nations without fear of interception unless theywere carrying
goods that belliger
were deemed contraband of war and
ent would use tomake war. Such
to
goods
subject
con
were
confiscation. A centuries-old tradition held that arms and ammunition
obvious
untenable.
Most
traband.
intended
nineteenth-century
in war,
for use
goods
Anglo-American
with
peacetime
commentators
uses?timber,
also
horses,
that when
agreed
raw materials,
and
be confiscated.8 As "property" destined formilitary use, fugi
food, for example?could
tive slaves escaping labor for the Confederacy could qualify as contraband under such a
definition.
and
Yet the principle of contraband of war was not applicable at Fortress Monroe,
Butler, a lawyer, knew it. The doctrine concerned the shipment of property by neutral
no neutral parties in the Fortress Monroe
confrontation. Butler
parties, and therewere
could theoretically have invoked a different tradition in international law to retain the
fugitives. Legal theorists generally approved the outright confiscation of enemy property
inwartime, particularly of articles used inwar. But ifButler had confiscated the fugitives
a
as enemy property, he would most likely have faced censure for
advancing
policy well
beyond that of the Lincoln administration. InMay 1861 theU.S. government had nei
ther forged a policy toward Confederate property of any kind nor fully acknowledged the
Confederacy
as a
belligerent
nation.
And,
as Lincoln's
inauguration
promise
not
to
inter
ferewith slavery implied, emancipation was by no means a government policy. Butler's
invocation of contraband ofwar thus avoided the pitfalls of both confiscation and eman
was never very
a
cipation. "The truth is,"Butler reflected in his 1892 memoir, "as lawyer I
as an executive officer I was very much comforted with it as a means of
of
but
it,
proud
doing my duty."9
Butler's contraband policy was legallyweak but culturally powerful. In the summer of
1861 and later, the federal government eschewed the contraband concept in favor of laws
and resolutions that specified the precise circumstances justisfying confiscation. Most
Northerners, however, were less concerned with the subtleties of law and more interested
in the labile new term "contraband." As Lincoln's secretaries laterwrote in their biogra
a few days, a new phrase was on every one's lips, and the
phy of the president, "Within
over the
were
full
of
editorials
newspapers
happy conception of treating fugi
chuckling
24, 1861, in The Civil War cd-rom: TheWar of theRebellion; A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and
version 1.5, Guild Press of Indiana, Carmel,
1997), ser. 1, vol.
Confederate Armies, dev. Philip Oliver (1 cd-rom,
Butler to Scott, May 27, 1861, with reply by the Secretary ofWar, May 30, 1861, ibid., ser. 2, vol. I,
II, 649-52;
at Fortress Monroe," Atlantic Monthly, 8 (Nov. 1861), 626-30.
754-55; Edward L. Pierce, "The Contrabands
8
See, for example, Joseph Moseley, What isContraband ofWar and What isNot: Comprising All theAmerican and
on the Subject (London, 1861), 8-9; James Kent, Commentaries onAmerican Law, vol. I (Boston,
English Authorities
1860), 143-50; and Emer de Vattel, The Law ofNations; or,Principles of the Law ofNature, Applied to the Conduct
Mod
and Affairs ofNations and Sovereigns (Philadelphia,
1852). Those works are available online in TheMaking
of
ern Law (Thomson Gale, 2004-).
9
Benj. F Butler (Boston, 1892),
Major-General
Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of
at For
259. For evidence that Butler knew the term "contraband" did not work legally, see Pierce, "Contrabands
627. The New York lawyer Charles Cooper Nott called the moniker "a good professional joke."
[Nott], Coming Contraband, 2. On federal indecisiveness about how to treat Confederate property, and the shaky
to
see Mark Grimsely, The Hard Hand
ofWar: Union Military Policy
legal foundations of the contraband policy,
ward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865
(New York, 1995), 11-17, 123; Guelzo, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation,
(Baton
31-33, 41-43; and Silvana R. Siddali, From Property toPerson: Slavery and theConfiscation Acts, 1861-1862
tressMonroe,"
Rouge,
2005).
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
TheWord
tive slaves
of rebel masters
"Contraband" and theMeanings
as contraband
of war."
It was
not
of Emancipation
long,
the
biographers
1055
recalled,
before the termwas shortened and "every negro in and about the army became familiarly
known
and
designated
as a
contraband.'"10
Northerners avidly followed the emergence of contrabands as principals in the drama
of war and wondered what would happen to slavery and enslaved people in a protracted
conflict. To abolitionists, events at Fortress Monroe
signaled what they hoped would be
African American activ
the beginning of the end of slavery, although many?especially
to
free.One white abo
the
slaves
reluctance
declare
ists?also criticized the government's
a
to
wrote
litionist inWashington
friend, "I hope those hundred slaves atMonroe may
be the signal for such a stampede!" Northern moderates
be declared contraband'?twill
and conservatives could be content that Butler's dictum cleverly divested Confederates of
as a
property while in theory leaving slavery intact. The New YorkHerald praised Butler
and lauded the contraband policy as one thatwould please "those
"strictobstructionist"
who regard slaves as absolute property" aswell as radicals, who would be "content to abide
not by his principles. "Such unanimity of opinion, on this
by [Butler's] conclusions," if
vexed question, is gratifying," the paper concluded. Not surprisingly,Confederates were
less happy. The Charleston Mercury, for example, condemned Butler's decree as evidence
of theUnion's hypocrisy. "Now, Cuffee and Sambo are slaves, or they are not," the paper
insisted. "If slaves, they should be delivered to their owners. If not slaves, by what right
is their labor coerced?" According to theMercury, the logically inconsistent policy was
evidence that theUnion would go to any lengths to crush the Confederacy, a signal that
the Confederacy must in response "smite unsparingly, with sweeping vengeance, and not
merely conquer but destroy!"11
to theUnion war effortbywalk
Fugitives from slaverymade themselves indispensable
to
own
them and by offering direct aid to theUnion. As
ing away from those who claimed
in earlier conflicts in theUnited States and theCaribbean, the enslaved took advantage of
the chaos and factionalism engendered by war to pursue their own interests. By late July
1861, some nine hundred former slaves, men, women, and children, had escaped to For
tressMonroe. Early fugitives at the fortwere surprised to hear themselves called "contra
band." Edward L. Pierce, designated by Butler to supervise them, reported thatwhen they
asked about the strange moniker, "we did not attempt an explanation."12 Many Union
commanders followed Butler's lead in setting fugitives towork on fortifications and em
ploying
them
around
camps
as
servants,
cooks,
and
teamsters.
Not
all military
leaders
course Butler had established, however. Reflecting the broader North
agreed with the
ern ambivalence about the status of
fugitive slaves, in fall 1861 Union commanders in
10
John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 vols., New York, 1890), IV, 388-89.
11
Gulielma Breed to Emily Howland, May 28, 1861 (addendum dated May 29), Emily Howland
Papers (Divi
sion of Rare and Manuscript
"Gen. Butler on Contraband
Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y.);
ofWar," Charleston Mercury, July 26, 1861.
Goods," New YorkHerald, May 29, 1861; "Negro Slaves Contraband
(I consulted theNew YorkHerald and some issues of the Christian Recorder online at Accessible Archives.) On the
legal logic (and illogic) of declaring slaves "contraband" and the policy's appeal for abolitionists and conservative
Northerners alike, see Pierce, "Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,"
626-27.
12
in late
627. For the number of fugitive slaves at Fortress Monroe
Pierce, "Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,"
July 1861, see Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F Butler during the Civil War Period (5 vols.,
Norwood, Mass.,
1917), I, 186. For slaves' initiatives during other conflicts, see Sylvia R. Frey,Water from theRock:
Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries
1998), 220, 228?357; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American
of Slavery inNorth America (Cambridge, Mass.,
156?58; and Laurent Dubois, A Colony of
Expansion and the Origins of theDeep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005),
in theFrench Caribbean, 1787-1804
Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation
(Chapel Hill, 2004), 85-168.
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1056
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri ordered their subordinates to keep fugitives out of the
federal lines. But slaves' determination to press forward, combined with white soldiers'
growing
Union
reluctance
to remand
slaves
to their
owners,
soon
made
such
a
policy
untenable.
quickly realized that fugitives offered not only their laboring bodies
but also useful knowledge about local terrain, civilians' morale, and Confederate
positions
and strategy.As military officials grappled with the
largely unanticipated influx,Union
forces advanced further into the Confederacy and
fugitives escaped to Union camps by
the thousand. Those fugitives?as well as the enslaved men, women, and children whose
homes
commanders
came
within
Union
lines
as armies
advanced?were
often
called
contrabands.13
reporters, abolitionists, and missionaries gave theNorth itsfirstglimpses of
Newspaper
the role of escaping slaves in thewar effort,and they tended to be as enamored of the term
"contraband" as military personnel. Soon after the first
fugitives arrived at Fortress Mon
roe,missionaries, teachers, and other scribes began traveling tomeet them and reporting
their observations, a pattern repeated most places theUnion army
occupied slaveholding
area, coastal South Carolina, and along theMis
territory,especially in theWashington
sissippi River.14 To them, the term "contraband" connoted both the property claims of
slaveholders and the uncertainty opened by thewar.
Abolitionists'
and missionaries'
early missives helped establish enduring represen
tational conventions that reflected ambivalence about the contrabands and what they
could become. These ostensibly sympathetic writers emphasized the chaos and come
dy that ensued when contrabands arrived at federal encampments. They described con
trabands as victims of a war they could not understand, as illiterate, unworldly, and
disorderly in their appearance and personal relationships. Artists' sketches printed as
engravings inmagazines and weekly newspapers depicted groups of contrabands as het
erogeneous and pathetic. Artists portrayed motley crowds featuring people of all ages,
all shades, and both sexes, wearing all manner of clothing and carrying disheveled col
lections of belongings. (See figures 1 and 2.) White Union soldiers were shown oversee
ing the groups, often on horseback, suggesting the contrabands' need forwhite men's
supervision.15 Such conventions were patronizing in their portrayal of the contrabands
13
On slaves' activities during thewar, see Berlin et al., eds., Freedom, ser. 1, vol. I, 18, 26-27\ 417; Ira Berlin,
"Who Freed the Slaves," in Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era, ed. David W
Blight and Brooks D. Simpson (Kent, 1997), 105-21 ; andWilliam W Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti
Confederate Southerners Shaped theCourse of theCivil War (New York, 2002), esp. 96-104. For early military uses of
the term "contraband," see Oliver, dev., Civil War cd-rom: War of theRebellion, ser. 1, vol. Ill, 143-44, ser. 1, vol.
VI, 175, ser. 1, vol. IV, 337, ser. 1, vol. Ill, 255. The navy used the term even more promiscuously than the army, in
part because naval secretary Gideon Welles codified its use in an order of September 25, 1861, outlining a separate
inNavy Blue
pay grade for "contrabands" in naval service. See Joseph P. Reidy, "Black Men
during the Civil War,"
33 (Fall 2001),
155-67.
Prologue,
14
See, for example, Robert H. Bremner, The Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Era (New
York, 1980), 98-109; Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964; Athens, Ga.,
1999); Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks,
1861-1890
(Athens, Ga., 1986); Clara Merritt DeBoer, His Truth IsMarching On: African Americans Who Taught
theFreedmen for theAmerican Missionary Association, 1861?1877
(New York, 1995); and Carol Faulkner, Women's
Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Aid Movement
(Philadelphia, 2004), 9-33.
15
of contrabands as chaotic and helpless appear throughout civilian and military records. For
Representations
see 1861 coverage inNational
nonmilitary examples,
Anti-Slavery Standard; Moncure D. Conway, Testimonies Con
cerning Slavery (1864; New York, 1969), 107; Circular, April 1862, Christian Recorder, May 24, 1862; letter of
Colored Citizen, Nov. 7, 1863, in TheNegro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during
J.G. McKee,
theWar for the Union, ed. James M. McPherson
(New York, 1965), 140-41; Cousin Sarah to Howland,
Jan. 26,
to "Dear Friends," Jan. 11, 1866, ibid.; "The Contrabands
at Port Royal,"
1863, Howland
Papers; Anna M. Powell
in the
Liberator, Dec.
12, 1862, p. 198; James B. Rogers, War Pictures: Experiences and Observations of a Chaplain
This content downloaded from 138.16.128.116 on Wed, 22 May 2013 13:50:04 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
TheWord
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1057
? Fso*
?iamSp?i?l
mPMHWS?
-THEIT
ATJW?nt?M>
BKBcms
?T.iM?'EDE
AMONG
THENEnllOES
IS VIMHSIA
ARRIVAL
Amur
Mo?bm.-S
Puk
M
JIOXIKttl
as
1. Artists
often represented
of contrabands
groups
heterogeneous,
Figure
disorga
in
the Negroes
and in need of white
nized,
among
supervision.
"Stampede
Virginia?
at Fortress Monroe."
in a
Their Arrival
Central panel
wood engraving, Frank
multipanel
Leslie's
Illustrated Weekly,/??^
8,
1861, pp. 56-57.
and PhotographsDivision, LC-USZ62-31165.
Courtesy
Library
of Congress,
Prints
as
undignified and dependent, but they did accommodate abolitionists' conviction that
contrabands, although damaged by enslavement, were susceptible to the civilizing insti
tutions of Christianity, family, and waged labor. The descriptions therefore reinforced
efforts to aid the contrabands materially and to reform them spiritually. But the repre
sentations could also suggest that incipient emancipation presented a crisis, that the lib
eration of millions of slaves would lead to chaos and upheaval forwhich the nation was
ill prepared.
rupture in slavery and the question of what would become of escap
also
slaves
ing
preoccupied Northern African Americans. For decades, black activists had
trained their attention on enslaved people in the South, fighting for abolition and aiding
to free territory.Now that slavery seemed to be
crumbling
fugitiveswho made theirway
church-based
and the possibility of abolition within reach, theywatched closely and?in
The wartime
U.S. Army, in theWar of the Southern Rebellion (Chicago, 1863), 110-13, 121-38; Pierce, "Contrabands at Fortress
and "The Lounger," Harper's Weekly, Jan. 11, 1862, p. 18. Other visual representations include
Monroe,"
635-36;
at Fortress Monroe,
on Their Way to Their
Day's Work Under the Pay and
"Morning Muster of the 'Contrabands'
intoOur Lines Under the Proclama
Direction of theU.S.," ibid., Nov. 2, 1861, p. 373; and "Contrabands Coming
tion,"Harper's Weekly, May 9, 1863, p. 293.
This content downloaded from 138.16.128.116 on Wed, 22 May 2013 13:50:04 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
1058
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
?SH)
C43I1IUMXM
COXiStti
?1XT
OftM?
7?1
I?MtHMKHK?
?MC
tMCLMUIIOfc-Itoa*
trhil WiHb-t?
Figure
2.
"Contrabands
Coming
into Camp
in
Consequence
of the Proclamation."
Wood
en
graving based on a sketchbyAlfredR. Waud, Harper's Weekly, Jan. 31, 1863, p. 68. Courtesy
Library ofCongress,Prints and PhotographsDivision, LC-USZ62-88812.
what action to take. Like
organizations, benevolent societies, and newspapers?discussed
white abolitionists, Northern African Americans freighted their representations of contra
bands with ideas about slaves' abjection and their need for uplift. One black resident of
Xenia, Ohio, reminded theNorthern black readers of the Christian Recorder, the official
organ of theAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church, that the neediest "contrabands" were
"now no longer brutes and chattels, but women and children; and ifwe do not stretch
forth our arms to their relief, the curse is upon our head." Here, "contrabands" repre
sented the transformation of "brutes and chattels" into human beings, albeit dependent
ones. IfNorthern African Americans did not act quickly, thewriter hinted, themoment
to barbarism. His rhetoric and his call to
might be lost and the contrabands consigned
action suggested both the distance many Northern black people felt from slaves and their
to reach out. Near Monrovia, Liberia, one ?migr?
sense of
imagined
special responsibility
...
are
to hear what the Government thinks they should
that "the contrabands
waiting
do." "I pray," he wrote in a letter, "that itmay be their own voluntary choice to come to
Africa."16
African American activists adopted the term "contraband" throughout their aid move
ment. The Xenia correspondent for the Christian Recorder enjoined readers: "If there is
any class of people, who, at this crisis demand the sympathy and immediate notice of
the colored citizens of theNorth, it is assuredly the contraband." The writer urged "every
colored community" to form "Contraband Aid Societies" and reported that Xenia had
29,
16
"Contrabands," Christian Recorder, Dec.
J.C. Maxwell,
1863, in Slaves No More: Lettersfrom Liberia, 1833-1869,
6, 1862; William
ed. Bell I.Wiley
C. Burke to Ralph R. Gurley, Sept.
(Lexington, Ky., 1980), 214.
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TheWord
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1059
already done so. Enlivened by that plea and others, Northern African American activists
built such organizations in droves, giving them such names as theAssociation for the Re
liefofDestitute Contrabands
(Boston) and theContraband Relief Association (Washing
ton, D.C.).17
Stirred by communiqu?s from colleagues in the South that described contrabands ar
riving destitute and ignorant inUnion camps, white and black activists recruited people
into the largely segregated aid societies that
burgeoned early in the war. Such organiza
tions held benefit concerts, raised money, and sent food,
clothing, and blankets to the fu
term
In
aid
the
the
"contraband"
the liminal and needy status
invoked
movement,
gitives.
of fugitives, innocents caught between bondage and freedom. Northern activists' use of
the term thus both generated meaningful relief and
highlighted the fugitives' powerless
ness and destitution. Just as antebellum abolitionists had
emphasized slaves' suffering to
advance a new theory of human rights, so the aid movement emphasized the
helplessness
of contrabands to insist that the fugitives deserved
sympathy and support.18
Many
ing
slaves
reports
were
on
contrabands
newsworthy
because
came
to the North
their
existence
via mainstream
made
newspapers.
the question
of
Escap
emancipation
unavoidable; because they provided labor power to the Union; because the government
had to develop policies to pay, house, and feed them; and because they had
unparalleled
access to information about the
Confederacy. One figure, the "intelligent contraband,"
became a critical part of theNorthern iconography of race and war. It is not clear whether
the press or the military invented the terms
"intelligent contraband" and "reliable con
arose
terms
the
but
because
traband,"
fugitives from slavery provided critical information
for theUnion. By spring 1862, military officials routinely referred to information
gleaned
from "intelligent" or "reliable" contrabands. In their
correspondence, military men as
sessed the supposed "intelligence" of contrabands in
deciding whether their reportswere
credible. The frequency with which military people employed the term
to
"intelligent"
modify "contraband" is striking,whether directly or in variations such as a reference to
"seven Contrabands who . . . are bright and
inteligent and can give us a great deal of in
formation."19 Army personnel used the modifiers "intelligent" and "reliable" to confer
17
For the associations' names, see "Association for the Relief of Destitute Contra
"Contrabands."
Maxwell,
in the District of Columbia,"
bands," Liberator, Oct.
10, 1862, p. 163; and "Relief of Contrabands
ibid, Sept. 25,
1863, p. 156. For other examples of African American contraband relief organizations, see C. Peter Ripley et al.,
eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers (5 vols., Chapel Hill, 1985-1992),
V, 251 ; J.H.H. to Editor, Christian Recorder,
March 21, 1863; and McPherson,
ed., Negro's Civil War, 135. For other uses of the term "contraband" by African
see "Aid for the Contrabands,"
in the reliefmovement,
Americans
Christian Recorder, March 22, 1862; "For the
to Editor, ibid, Oct. 25, 1862; "Societies in
Contrabands,"
ibid.,March 29, 1862; J. P. Hamer
D.C.,
Washington,
for the Benefit of theContraband,"
ibid., Nov. 1, 1862; "Contribution of Clothes for the Contrabands,"
ibid., Dec.
Still to Rev. E. Weaver,
27, 1862; William
ibid, April 18, 1863; Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Jan. 30, 1862, in
Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters
and Addie Brown ofHartford,
from Rebecca Primus ofRoyal Oak, Maryland,
ed. Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York, 1999), 58-59; and Harriet A. Jacobs, "Life
Connecticut, 1854-1868,
among
the Contrabands,"
Liberator, Sept. 5, 1862, p. 3.
18
For concerts as fund raisers for contraband relief, see "Musical
Music, March
Intelligence," Dwight's Journal of
29, 1862, p. 414; "Concert at National Hall," Christian Recorder, Nov. 22, 1862; H.M.T.
to Editor, ibid, Jan. 10,
1863; and "The Hutchinson
Family," ibid.,March 7, 1863. For the connection between abolitionism and emerging
thresholds of human rights, see Elizabeth B. Clark, "'The Sacred
Pain, Sympathy, and the Cul
Rights of theWeak':
ture of Individual
Rights inAntebellum America," Journal ofAmerican History, 82 (Sept. 1995), 463-93.
19
Berlin et al., eds., Freedom, ser. 1, vol. I, 302. For
military personnel's references to "intelligent contrabands"
and speculations on the relationship between ex-slaves' intellectual
capacity and the information they provided, see
ser. 1, vol. LI, no. 1, 675-76,
Oliver, dev., Civil War cd-rom: War of theRebellion, ser. 1, vol. VI, 266-67,
ser. 1, vol.
ser. 1, vol. XXX, no. 3, 778, ser. 1, vol. XLI, no. 2, 382, ser. 1, vol. XXXIX, no. 2, 122-23. The
XXIV, 223-24,
account of
as critical sources of information for the Union war effort is
pioneering
fleeing slaves
Quarles, Negro in
theCivil War, 78-92.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
1060
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
intellectual authority on people who otherwise had virtually none, as if the adjectives
restored what the term "contraband" had eclipsed: a possibility that fugitive slaves could
be worldly, knowledgeable, and an asset to the Union effort. Indeed, by distinguishing
certain escapees as trustworthy, the phrase "intelligent contraband" subtly reinforced the
most slaveswere not worth
commonplace assumption among Northern whites that
taking
as
some
or "reliable" may have had
Yet
of
the
seriously.
people
"intelligent"
designation
more to do with the need of soldiers and reporters to defend their reliance on informa
tion provided by fleeing slaves thanwith their perceptions of the individuals who provided
them with information.
accounts of the front in two
Intelligent contrabands entered newspaper reporters'
ways. First, reportersmentioned them as sources ofmilitary information, notifying their
readers that such creatures had provided Union officerswith data about the terrain, the
enemy's
or other
position,
matters.
Second,
reporters
sought
out
news
from
"intelligent
and passed it along to their readers, often suggesting that such information
enabled them to scoop their competition. As informants to both military officials and re
porters, "intelligent" and "reliable" contrabands appeared not just in news reporting but
contrabands"
in editorials,
also
and
fiction,
cartoons.20
The term "intelligent contraband" converged happily with another catchphrase inCiv
ilWar journalism: "contraband intelligence." As newspaper reporters battled with mili
tary officials over the kinds of information that could be reported to the public, they be
were not at
gan using the phrase "contraband intelligence" to refer to information they
came
term
to
to
into
is
ascertain
It
which
difficult
widespread usage first,
liberty publish.
was surely
or "contraband
intelligence," but their relationship
"intelligent contraband"
In both
evocative.
the law,while
mation.
The
the
phrases,
"intelligent"
multiple
or
term
"contraband"
"intelligence"
of the words
valences
invoked
implied mental
"contraband"
and
transgression,
property,
and
acumen and strategic infor
"intelligence"
were
not
lost
at the headquarters of theDepartment of theTen
George E. Bryant, commander
nessee inMarch
1863, who reported, "I have reed, to day 'Contraband' intelligence from
on Col.
two
different
sources.
...
I
give
it for what
it isworth."21
Northerners' attitudes toward the information offered by contrabands reflected varying
in the future of the nation. Republican
hopes and concerns about the role of black people
were making to theUnion
Americans
African
contribution
the
publications emphasized
war effort. In representing escapees as active allies, such publications helped refute the
as passive, ignorant, and a burden on the armed forces. Reflecting
popular image of slaves
the prevailing idea that active citizenship was gendered male, scenes portraying the serious
20
111.,
ed., It Is Begun! The Pantograph Reports the Civil War (Bloomington,
See, for example, Don Munson,
107; "The Escape of theNashville," New YorkHerald, March 29, 1862; "Important from Port Royal," ibid,
ibid., July 27, 1863; "Meade's Army," ibid., Sept. 16, 1863; "General
June 17, 1862; "Important from Charleston,"
to Editor, Christian Recorder, Sept. 13, 1862; "Miscellaneous
Banks' Department,"
13, 1863; H.M.T.
ibid, Oct.
Rebellion News," New York Times, Feb. 9, 1862; and "News from Fortress Monroe,"
ibid.,March 27, 1862.
21
G. E. Bryant toA. A. G. Rawlins, May 24, 1863, inFreedom, ser. 1, vol. I, ed. Berlin et al., 307. For refer
and the Little Villain," New YorkHerald, May 29, 1862;
ences to "contraband intelligence," see "General McClellan
16, 1862; "News from Burnside's Army," ibid., Nov. 20, 1862; "The Army
"Important from Kentucky," ibid., Oct.
of the Potomac," ibid., July 30, 1863; "The Siege of Charleston?Contraband
Intelligence," ibid., Aug. 20, 1863;
"Meade's Army," ibid., Dec. 4, 1863; and "The Decisive Struggle," ibid., May 7, 1864. For an early secondary ac
Problem in Its Bearing upon
count of the problem of "contraband" intelligence, see J.G. Randall, "The Newspaper
For conflicts about
Military Secrecy during the Civil War," American Historical Review, 23 (Jan. 1918), 303-23.
War Newsmen inAction (1954; Madi
see Louis M. Starr, Bohemian
Civil
sensitive
information,
Brigade:
publishing
son, 1987).
2001),
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TheWord
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1061
HLWS*.
CONTRABAND
to reporters as women
A male
information
and children
look on.
Figure 3.
fugitive conveys
over
The title of the panel,
"Contraband
invokes the wartime
debate
News,"
publishing
sensitive information.
Part of "The Press, the Field, the Sketchbook."
Wood
engraving based
on a sketchby ThomasNast, Harper's Weekly, April 30, 1864, p. 280. Courtesy
Library of
Congress,
Prints
and
Photographs
Division,
LC-USZ62-123476.
as a man. For instance, a
exchange of information represented the "contraband"
Harpers
an individual black man
a reporter while sev
showed
illustration
Weekly
talking with
eral women and children looked on. (See figures 3 and 4.) Images of trust or confidence
among black and white men contrasted sharplywith depictions of large groups of contra
bands that emphasized disorder and chaos as well as distance between fugitive slaves and
white people. Portrayals of individual fugitive slave men conveying information to the
at great peril to themselves implied that such men
might have the independence
sustain themselves in freedom.22
of thought and action?the
"manhood"?to
Conversely, themany white Northerners who believed black people to be naturally ca
pricious or stupid saw the "intelligent contraband" as a contradiction in terms.To them,
Union
22
For written accounts that credit fugitive slaves with helping thewar effort, see "The Slavery Question," Harp
er'sWeekly, Dec. 7, 1861, p. 770; "Domestic Intelligence," ibid., Jan. 18, 1862, p. 35; "Our Special Correspondence
with the Land Forces," New York Herald, July 19, 1863; Frank Moore, Anecdotes, Poetry and Incidents of theWar:
North and South, 1860-1865
374; and Allan Pinkerton, The Spy of the
268, 298-99,
(New York, 1867), 263-64,
Rebellion (New York, 1883), 194, 245, 343-93. On manliness and autonomy as prerequisites of citizenship, see
in Early American Politi
Fran?ois Furstenberg, "Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance
cal Discourse," Journal ofAmerican History, 89 (March 2003),
1295-1330. On the exclusion of freed women from
"the active category of citizen" in several postemancipation
societies, see Cooper, Holt, and Scott, Beyond Slavery,
17-18.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
1062 The Journal ofAmerican History
a "reliable contraband"
4. Here
Figure
counter with army
Edwin
personnel.
March
as an individual man
is depicted
"The Reliable
Contraband."
Forbes,
in a face-to-face
Copper-plate
2007
en
etch
ing inLife Studies of theGreat Army, byEdwin Forbes (New York, 1876), plate 23. Courtesy
Library ofCongress,Prints and PhotographsDivision, LC-USZ62-15833.
relied on slaves for information were evidence that thewar was
was
elevating fugitive
being poorly prosecuted and, perhaps worse, that the government
men.
to
status
slaves
the
of
Journalists often cited "intelligent contrabands" with a tone
of irony or sarcasm. A New York Times reporter traveling with the army inMississippi
reports that the Union
ridiculed an African American guide who failed to lead U.S. soldiers to a bridge as "one
.
have been of
of those intelligent contrabands' developed during the present war . . who
such singular service in all cases to theNational Government." The Democratic press con
sistently challenged the army's trust in information provided by fleeing slaves, believing
slaves were not only ignorant, but deceitful. A Vanity Fair cartoon mockingly titled "The
a black man with simian features
signaling in
Highly Intelligent Contraband" depicted
nate racial inferiorityand lack of
cartoon
showed the con
intelligence. (See figure 5.) The
traband arriving inNew York City in search of the Republican newspaper editor Horace
Greeley. By representing Greeley as a fleeing shadow, the illustration charged Republicans
with the hypocrisy of favoring emancipation but refusing to confront its implications.
Greeley s shadow is almost indistinguishable from that of the contraband, a visual gesture
to theDemocrats' argument thatRepublican policies would result in racial
amalgamation
and white racial degeneration.23
23
inMississippi," New York Times, Dec.
"The War
18, 1862; "The Highly
Intelligent Contraband,"
Vanity
Fair, April 26, 1862, p. 203. For ironic or ridiculing references to "intelligent contrabands," see "Advance of the
of
14, 1862; "The Condition
Army," New York Times, June 1, 1862; "An Original but Doubtful View," ibid., Oct.
the South," ibid., Dec. 25, 1862; "More Delusive Prophesies," ibid., March 30, 1863; "Negro News,"
ibid., June
12, 1863; "AMain Cause of the Defeat at Charleston," New YorkHerald, April 17, 1863; "A Disorder and a Com
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
TheWord
j
j
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
THE HIGHLY
INTELLIGENT CONTRABAND,
wmn*a
aunam.
ni m non'mi Swrm"
m ?Mr
Ha.Owner,
anEmmi?hmmV
m irP
In this
titled image, the contraband's
features are drawn accord
sarcastically
Figure 5.
to racist conventions
that imply inferiority and stupidity.
"The Highly
ing
Intelligent
Contraband." Wood engravingbyBobbett and Hooper, Vanity Fair,April 26, 1862, p.
203.
Courtesy
Library
of Congress,
Rare
Books
Room.
The Vanity Fair cartoon exemplifies Democratic
representations of contrabands as a
threat to the North, in contrast with typical Republican portrayals of contrabands as
harmless and passive. Few freedpeople migrated North during thewar, and with foreign
immigration diminished and many white men in themilitary, slaves posed little danger
to the livelihoods ofNorthern white
working people. Nevertheless, activating Northern
ers' long-standing fears that slave emancipation would harm Northern free labor proved
politically effective for thewartime Democrats, who insisted that ex-slaves, often referred
to
as "contrabands," were on the verge of
sense
contemptuously
flooding theNorth. The
of mobility and indeterminate status inherent in the term "contraband" was especially
suited to arguments about the potential negative influence of black migrants on north
ern society. In January 1863 a white Ohioan
informed his brother of the arrest of four
men "of the class known
as
contrabands." "They are the advance guard ofthat
now-a-days
great army which is advancing northward to take possession of our jails and penitentia
ries," he predicted. "Ere long we will be compelled to build new ones for their accom
modation."24
plaint," Vanity Fair, April 19, 1862, p. 188; and "Humors of theWar," ibid., Aug. 16, 1862, p. 138. For other com
parisons of "contrabands" with apes, see "Light on a Dark Subject," ibid., June 14, 1862, p. 286; "Greeley sVision,"
ibid., Aug. 30, 1862, p. 102; and "Broadway Menagerie," New York Times, Jan. 13, 1863, p. 7.
24
in Frank L. Klement, The
Middle West (Chicago, 1960), 46. For the argument over
Quoted
Copperheads in the
contrabands' migration north, see "The Cry of Nig., Nig., Nigger," Springfield Illinois Daily State Journal, Oct.
16,
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
1064
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
a
By fall 1862?facing
growing population of slaves within Union lines and a political
to
Northern
whites that fugitive slaves would remain in the South?
imperative
persuade
areas of
theU.S. government finally formulated a policy toward slaves inUnion-occupied
create
theConfederacy. The army would
"contraband camps" in theConfederacy and on
to
itsperiphery, both
assuage white Northerners' fears of an exodus ofAfrican Americans
to theNorth and to allow
military officials to centralize relief efforts.The name given the
camps reflected the intention that they be temporary holding areas for displaced people
and
serve
a
status
contrabands?whose
population?the
remained
ambiguous.
Contra
band camps became hubs for the distribution of rations and clothing and laboratories for
a
great
experiment
in
remaking
Southern
society
on
a foundation
of free
labor.
In prac
tice, the camps also became social and political centers for freedpeople, who organized
churches, schools, and civic associations as they began to build lives outside the authority
of slave owners. Life in the camps could be brutal, however. Conditions were often abys
mal, and residents frequently suffered from disease, exposure, malnutrition, and swin
dling and abuse by soldiers.25
How many people passed through the contraband camps during thewar or how many
to
"contrabands" therewere proves difficult to estimate. One partial snapshot?responses
a questionnaire circulated to camp
that
1862?indicated
superintendents inDecember
therewere some 18,000 within Union lines in Florida and South Carolina and over 5,000
more in camps inHelena, Arkansas, and in
on Craney Island and around For
Virginia
tressMonroe. Populations were transient. About 3,400 migrants had passed through the
in the previous sixmonths.26 Eventually contraband camps sprang
camps inWashington
up virtually everywhere Union forces occupied Confederate territory,and as black men
1862; "Mr. Swett on Immigration," ibid., Oct. 22, 1862; "Contraband Labor in Illinois," Chicago Tribune, Oct. 8,
1862; "The Contraband Hegira," ibid, Nov. 1, 1862; "Negro Immigration," Liberator, Oct. 31, 1862 (quoting In
dianapolis Indiana State Sentinel); "Contrabands andWhat They Cost!," Albany Atlas and Argus, Jan. 29, 1863; and
Charles Ward, Contrabands: Suggesting an Apprenticeship, Under theAuspices ofGovernment, toBuild thePacific Rail
Road, January 8, 1863 (Salem, Mass.,
1866). For references to threatening migrants as "contrabands," see Arthur
cd-rom: War
C. Cole, The Era of theCivil War, 1848-1870
(Springfield, 111., 1919), 334-35; Oliver, dev., Civil War
ser. 2, vol. V, 521-22;
"The Song of the Contraband,"
10, 1862, p. 229; "Liberty.
Vanity Fair, May
of theRebellion,
A Romance,"
ibid., 7 (Feb. 1863), 22; Klement, Copperheads in theMiddle West, 16; and Iver Bernstein, TheNew
York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in theAge of theCivil War (New York, 1990),
111-13. On antiblack sentiment in the Civil War North, see also Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response
toEmancipation
and the
TheMidwest
and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968); V Jacque Voegeli, Free butNot Equal:
Union Policy and the Re
Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967); V Jacque Voegeli, "A Rejected Alternative:
of Emancipation," Journal of Southern History, 69 (Nov. 2003),
location of Southern 'Contrabands' at the Dawn
765?90;
Jean H. Baker, Affairs ofParty: The Political Culture ofNorthern Democrats in theMid-Nineteenth
Century
andWartime Migra
and Leslie A. Schwalm, "'Overrun with Free Negroes': Emancipation
(Ithaca, 1983), 212-58;
P. Johnson,
tion in theUpper Midwest," Civil War History, 50 (June 2004), 145-74. On themigrants, seeMichael
of Former Slaves to theMidwest
"Out of Egypt: The Migration
Perspective,"
during the 1860s in Comparative
ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline
in Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora,
McLeod
1999), 223-45.
(Bloomington,
25
On life inside the camps, see n. 5 above and Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles
Leon F. Litwack, Been
in theRural Southfrom Slavery to theGreat Migration
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 72-79, 82;
"Corinth: The Story of a
in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979), 3-166; Cam Walker,
Contraband Camp," Civil War History, 20 (March 1974), 5-22; and Martha Mitchell Bigelow, "Freedmen of the
ibid., 8 (March 1962), 38-47. On the evolution of U.S. policy toward fugitive
Mississippi Valley, 1862-1865,"
and Berlin et al., eds., Freedom, ser. 1, vol. II, 30-32,
slaves in army camps, seeVoegeli, Free butNot Equal, 95-117;
41-43, 62-63.
26
Facts Concerning the Freedmen. Their Capacity and Their Destiny. Collected and Published by the Emancipa
that least 474,000
former slaves and
tion League (Boston, 1863), 4-11. The most thorough estimate concluded
free labor in theUnion-occupied
free blacks participated in some form of government-sponsored
South; the num
ber includes "soldiers, military laborers, residents of contraband camps, urban workers, or agricultural laborers on
et al., eds., Freedom, ser. 1, vol. II, 77.
plantations and farms." Berlin
government-supervised
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TheWord
enlisted in the Union
their families.
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1065
army, the camps provided housing and a modicum
of support to
As the government took steps to keep escapees in the South, artists and writers who
favored emancipation worked to counter negative images of contraband migrants by por
as docile laborers and even as fonts of morality and
traying them
Christianity. Didactic
stories for children, published in the children's magazines that began to flourish in this
era, represented Southern contrabands as appropriate objects of charity and migrants to
theNorth as exotic but harmless objects of curiosity. The stories used the plight of con
trabands to teach middle-class children the virtue of denying themselves material plea
sures in order to
one novella, Chrismus, a contraband from Port
help others. In
Royal,
in South Carolina's Sea Islands, helps a white Rhode Island family rediscover
religious
faith and, through the good graces of his kind former owner and a Northern minister, is
finally reunited with his wife, whom he had not seen since leaving the South. Such sto
ries portrayed fleeing slaves as innocent seekers of the free-labor ideal of an independent
home and hearth.27
Antislavery Northerners also sought to demonstrate that contrabands would prove
or North. To
good waged laborers, in the South
dispel the popular argument that slaves
were
not
and
would
work
unless
forced, they publicized the industrious
inherently lazy
ness of contrabands in theUnion camps and
speculated that freed slaves would help ame
liorate labor shortages in theNorth. A short story entitled "Our Contraband," published
inHarpers New Monthly Magazine
in August 1863, addressed Northerners' concerns
about integrating former slaves into theNorthern, urban economy. In the story a New
York society matron takes Aggie, a black teenager newly arrived fromVirginia, into her
home as a servant, sensing that, although the girl has been unmanageable
in the homes of
other white people, she can be reformed. The project is a disaster. The matron's husband
and Irish servants oppose the plan, and the girl proves inconsistent in her
housekeeping
and care of the children. Moreover, Aggie seems culturally unassimilable, singing strange
songs at inappropriate moments and manifesting mysterious religious beliefs. Finally, Ag
gie flees the home but finds Christianity and proper morality by livingwith, and working
for, aQuaker woman. The story's logic did not permit the freed girl to be anything other
than a domestic servant to white people, but it suggested that in the
rightmilieu, "our
contraband" would prove a good laborer and a good Christian.28
Since
contrabands
were
so often
portrayed
as
pathetic,
threatening,
or
exotic,
many
African American writers were uncomfortable with the term. Some called forwholesale
rejection of it,while many others used itwith caveats. African Americans' first objection
was to a
on the
policy based, in thewords of the historian George Washington Williams,
27
H. W. T. Root, Contraband Christmas (Boston, 1864). On children's
magazines during the war, see James
Marten, ed., Lessons ofWar: The Civil War in Children'sMagazines
1999), xv-xvii, 8-9, 157. For
(Wilmington, Del.,
moralistic stories for children
see Louisa
ibid, 87
featuring contraband characters,
May Alcott, "Nelly's Hospital,"
that Johnny Rented," ibid, 166-77; Christie Pearl, "The Contraband,"
99; Emily Huntington Miller, "The House
ibid, 187-90; Lydia Maria Child, "The Two Christmas Evenings," ibid, 190-203;
and R. W
Smith, "The Little
Contrabands," Friend, Nov. 5, 1864, p. 10. See also Hand Shadow Stories (Boston, 1863), 14-17.
28
"Our Contraband," Harper's New
27 (Aug. 1863), 395-403.
For repre
Mary E. Dodge,
Monthly Magazine,
sentations of contrabands as industrious, see Facts
Concerning theFreedmen; E. L. Pierce, "The Freedmen at Port
and "'Work's Over'?Scenes
Royal," Atlantic Monthly, 12 (Sept. 1863), 308-10;
among the Beaufort Contrabands,"
Harper's Weekly, Dec. 21, 1861, cover, 803. For an argument that contrabands should become servants in theNorth,
see David Sears to
Henry Wilson,
July 23, 1861, in Contrabands and Vagrants, by David Sears (n.d., n.p.). On the
actual migration of black laborers to theNorth, often as servants, see Schwalm, "'Overrun with Free
Negroes.'"
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1066
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
"false idea" that people could own other people. In January 1862 Frederick Douglass con
the term as "a name thatwill apply better to a pistol, than to a person." A pseud
onymous correspondent for the Christian Recorder argued that despite the term's "popu
larity and general use" in reference to fleeing slaves," "thisword is objectionable, because it
is properly applicable to things, and not topersons. Moreover, "when used in reference to
persons, it is disparaging to them, ifnot degrading." The writer advised, "Such use ought,
therefore, to be discontinued, especially by colored speakers and writers," recommending
or
instead theword "refugee,"which meant "a PERSON
protection from
seeking shelter
demned
or
oppression
lJ
wrong.
African Americans did not discontinue use of the term,which was already in wide
use in the aid movement and the
military. But many African American writers and
spread
a balance
some white ones
to
strike
by drawing attention to its artificial or pro
attempted
visional nature when they used the term. Some referred to "so-called contrabands," em
was not their term, but someone else's. Others
placed quota
phasizing that "contraband"
tion marks around the term. From South Carolina, the activist and former slave Harriet
Tubman reported to allies in Boston on the Rebels' "most valuable livestock, known up
in your region as contrabands.'"30 The phrasing highlighted the multiple ways people
IfRebels viewed them as
South Carolina.
viewed African Americans inUnion-occupied
"livestock"
and
Yankees
saw
them
as
"contrabands,"
Tubman
no
doubt
saw
them
as hu
man
even African Americans who
to the term's nega
beings. But
recognized and objected
tive connotations may have embraced its newness and flexibility; perhaps no other term
seemed
to
capture
the
fugitives'
spontaneous
exodus
tus once they had fled. Perhaps "contraband"
tions commonly used by whites.
from
slavery
or
their
ambiguous
sta
seemed more neutral than other designa
Like African Americans, white people understood that thewords they chose to refer
to black people said much about their broader perspectives on race, citizenship, and in
were flush with words for people of
equality. During the war, newspapers and journals
African descent and with commentaries on the proliferation of terms. One conservative
joked that Lincoln had preferred "negroes" in 1859, "colored men" in 1860,
in 1862. In
"intelligent contrabands" in 1861, and "freeAmericans of African descent"
periodical
an
ostensibly
humorous
account
of a Northerner's
travels
in the South,
the narrator
re
the Image of
the Son of Ham?alias
ferred to a black man as "The Sable Brother?alias
the Irre
the Contraband?alias
theOppressed Type?alias
carved in Ebony?alias
God
theChattel?alias
pressible Nigger?alias
the Goose."31 Such
Great Cause?alias
the
theCollud Pusson?alias
theDarky?alias
litanies emphasized the unstable status of black
29
on theWar," Christian Recorder, Jan. 18, 1862; Senex, "Contraband,"
"The Great Speech. Frederick Douglass
ibid, Aug. 9, 1862.
30
Harriet Tubman,
letter, June 30, 1863, in Black Abolitionist Papers, ed. Ripley et al., V, 221. For other ex
the term, see entry forOct. 28, 1862, in The Journals of
amples of black writers placing quotation marks around
Charlotte Porten Grimke, ed. Brenda Stevenson (New York, 1988), 388; and James F. Jones, letter,May 8, 1864, in
ed. Edwin S.
A Grand Army ofBlack Men: Lettersfrom African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861-1865,
use of "so-called" with "contrabands," see George A. Rue to Editor, Christian
Redkey (New York, 1992), 142. For
to Editor, ibid, Oct. 18, 1862; Mr. Edward Young and Rev. Henry Davis to Editor,
Recorder, Aug. 9, 1862; H.M.T.
ibid, Nov. 15, 1862; and J.H.H. to Editor, ibid, March 21, 1863.
31
The Old Guard, 1 (June 1863), 144; "Through the Cotton States," Knickerbocker; or,New YorkMonthly Maga
see
zine, 58 (Oct. 1861), 316. For other white commentary on themyriad terms available forAfrican Americans,
(1893; New York, 1968), 18; and
"Greeley's Vision"; Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands
"Contraband ofWar," Harper's Weekly, June 29, 1861, p. 416.
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"Contraband" and theMeanings
The Word
of Emancipation
1067
an entireworld view. "The sable
people in the nation and way that each term could imply
was associated with the aboli
for
interracial
denoted
and
brother,"
example,
fraternity
tionist movement, whereas "the irrepressible nigger" alluded to the Democratic
party's
frustration with the dominance of slavery in national politics. Indeed, the derogatory
term
was widely used in the Democratic press, among white soldiers, and else
"nigger"
where, while Republicans self-consciously eschewed it, at least in print. In the 1863 short
the author signals that the family's Irish servants are racist by
story, "Our Contraband,"
use such terms as
them
the nar
having
"big black nigger" and, in dialect, "nagers."When
rator
refers
to the
ex-slave
servant,
Aggie,
as
a "contraband,"
the
term
is often
in
placed
quotes, highlighting the provisional nature of both Aggie's status and the term itself.At
the end of the story,when the narrator discovers thatAggie has found live-in work in a
Quaker's home, she refers toAggie as a "colored girl," as ifher departure from the narra
tor's household?one
that had never fully accepted her?had
rendered her more human
and freer than the term "contraband" could acknowledge.32
The multiple meanings inherent in the Civil War designation of fleeing slaves as "con
traband"
made
the
term
evocative
and,
for many,
amusing
to use.
In
international
law,
contraband had long implied secrecy or subterfuge. Many writers and artists could not
resistmerging those old meanings with newer ones
to slavery and
emancipation.
relating
In an illustration forHarpers Weekly, the artist
Winslow Homer drew a black man slouch
ing on barrels marked "contraband," an allusion to the ironies of confiscating both peo
as contraband of war. Likewise, when the abolitionist author Louisa
ple and goods
May
Alcott sent a package of nuts and apples toMassachusetts
soldiers stationed inVirginia
inDecember
1862, she wrote, "The nuts are a sort of edible contraband, black, hard to
care
take
of & not much in them in the end." The linksAlcott, Homer, and others used
"contraband"
to
forge?among
blackness,
humor,
and
not
transgressiveness?were
new.
Rather, theywere a mainstay of blackface minstrelsy, themost popular form of entertain
ment in the antebellum United States.33
Inminstrelsy white performers blacked their faces with burnt cork and caricatured Af
rican American
songs,
dances,
and
speech
before
largely
working-class
audiences.
Many
ostensibly humorous representations of contrabands harked back to minstrel perfor
mance. Consistent with minstrel traditions of
selling representations of black people and
decorative
performance, publishers printed
envelopes showing caricatured contrabands
and a collectible card photograph featuring an
"intelligent contraband." One envelope
32
"Our Contraband,"
396-97, 402. For examples of Republicans
Dodge,
attributing the derogatory word "nig
to others
and studiously avoiding it themselves, seeMary
ger"
(especially Democrats)
Logan, Reminiscences of the
Civil War and Reconstruction, ed.
1970), 80, 84, 86; "The Vallandigham
George Worthington Adams (Carbondale,
ers and the
15, 1862; "The Cry of Nig., Nig., Nigger," ibid,
'Niggers,'" Springfield Illinois Daily State Journal, Oct.
Oct. 16, 1862; and Root, Contraband Christmas, 17. For
"nigger" in the diaries and letters of white Union soldiers,
see Randall C. Jimerson, The Private Civil War:
1988),
Popular Thought during the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge,
and Bell IrvinWiley, The Life ofBilly Yank: The Common Soldier
86-123;
of the Union (New York, 1951). On the
increasingly derogatory connotations of theword "nigger" during the firsthalf of the nineteenth century, see Patrick
Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in theAntebellum North (Chapel Hill, 2002), 82-117.
See also Randall Ken
nedy,
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York, 2002).
33
Winslow Homer, "The Songs of theWar," Harper's
Louisa May Alcott to
Weekly, Nov. 23, 1861, pp. 744-45;
Edward J. Bartlett and Garth Wilkinson
James, Dec. 4, 1862, in The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel
Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Athens, Ga., 1995), 81-82. For a good analysis of humor about contrabands, see Fahs,
Imagined Civil War, 212?23. On similar themes in the history of art, seeMarc Simpson, "The Bright Side: 'Humor
and Truthfully Executed,'"
inWinslow Homer
ously Conceived
Paintings of the Civil War, ed. Marc Simpson (San
Francisco, 1988), 47-63.
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1068
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
over the caption "Music by the 'Contra-Band,'" while
portrayed four blackface minstrels
an item in
a "New Refrain of a
Fair
provided
Vanity
Slave-song":
For we're
a band
For we're
a band
of niggers,
of
niggers,
A contraband of niggers,
And
we
can't
go
to the war!
to the transformation
Applying the idea of transgressiveness inherent in "contraband"
of a white man into a blackface minstrel, an 1867 Atlantic Monthly article described the
white minstrel performer Thomas D. Rice as he "shaded his own countenance to the
contraband'
hue."34
was
in Republican, Democratic,
and
Minstrel-style contraband humor
ubiquitous
even white abolitionist publications and?in
the latter?reflected the limitations of ra
on racist stereotypes elaborated inmin
cially egalitarian thinking in the period. Drawing
as
the
abolitionist
National
Standard
strelsy,
portrayed African Americans
Anti-Slavery
either
simple
and
na?ve
or
pretentious.
Scores
of
anecdotes
portrayed
con
"intelligent
trabands" who proved ignorant of their surroundings or of the vicissitudes of thewar. A
in Our Young Folks, a popular children's magazine
profile of the painterWinslow Homer
to
in
the
reveals
Boston,
complexity of Republican and antislavery attitudes
published
ward contrabands and thewidespread use of contrabands as comedie figures. The maga
zine, which also printed abolitionist-style stories about Northern white children learning
to help needy contrabands, focused its story on Homer's
1865 painting The Bright Side,
which depicted a group of black men resting outside an army tent. (See figure 6.) The
article included an engraving of the central figures in The Bright Side, whom itdescribed
as bees love honey, [who]
as "three
loving the sunshine
picturesque-looking Contrabands,
a
on
warm
the
side of tent." Playing to stereotypes of black
have stretched themselves out
laziness,
constitute
the article
continued:
"Something
Paradise."
Much
a Contraband's
to eat,
nothing
of the article
told
to do,
and
plenty
a "humorous"
of
story
sunshine
of Hom
er's supposed search for a model for one of the figures. According to the story,Homer
his
arrived inNew York City fromVirginia?into
forced an ex-slave bootblack?recently
studio, only to have theman panic, "roll himself up into a ball," and go "ricocheting" out
of Homer's studio and down the stairs. The writer explained that "the simple fellow had
somehow
conceived
the
idea
that
the artist was
a medicine-man,'
(i.e.
an
army-surgeon,)
and that he had lured him . . . into his den for the purpose of relieving [him] of a limb or
two." The story used physical comedy and familiar tropes of slaves' ignorance?including
entertain young readers. The engrav
their supposed faith inmagic instead of science?to
34
For the "contra-band" en
"Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy," Atlantic Monthly, 20 (Nov. 1867), 609.
seeWilliam R. Weiss Jr., The Catalog ofUnion Civil War Patriotic Covers [Bethlehem, Penn., 1995], 285. For
velope,
28
the "new refrain," see Vanity Fair, June 15, 1861, p. 280. For the card photograph, secArthur's Home Magazine,
(Dec. 1866), back matter. For additional "contraband" envelopes, see Eva V. Carline, "When Cotton Was King,"
Overland Monthly, 36 (July 1900), 21. For the use of "contraband" to invoke things subversive or illicit, see also
Sarah Emma Edmonds, Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse and Spy. A Woman's Adventures in theUnion Army, ed. Elizabeth
"Our Contraband,"
D. Leonard (1865; DeKalb,
401; and Charles King, "A Contraband Christ
1999), 57; Dodge,
19, 1896, pp. 1246-50. On antebellum minstrelsy, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Black
mas," Harper's Weekly, Dec.
Class (New York, 1993); Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: TheMinstrel Show in
face Minstrelsy and theAmerican Working
W T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow
Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974);
toHip Hop
eds., Inside the
1998); Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara,
(Cambridge, Mass.,
Minstrel Mask: Readings inNineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover, 1996); and David R. Roediger, The
Making
of theAmerican Working Class (New York, 1991), 115?31.
Wages ofWhiteness: Race and the
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The Word
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1069
Figure 6. "The Bright Side."Wood engravingbased on a painting byWinslowHomer, Our
Young Folks, 2 (July1866), 396. CourtesyLibrary ofCongress,General Collection.
ing and the text presented two stylized representations of former slaves. One emphasized
laziness, the other ignorance; both implied that a deep cultural chasm separated themag
azine s readers from the former slaves.35
Contrabands also pervaded popular music, which became a key area forNorthern rep
resentation of contrabands and, by extension, for speculation on themeanings of emanci
pation. As slave emancipation unfolded amid Union military occupation in the Confed
eracy, activists reported on and transcribed examples of contraband singing, abolitionists
wrote versions ofwhat they
imaginedthe contrabands would sing, and songwriters penned
minstrel songs with contraband narrators. In keeping with whites' long-standing inter
est in African American dance, illustrators depicted contrabands
someone
dancing, and
invented and marketed a "dancing contraband" doll.36 The spread of songs about (and
35
T. B. Aldrich, "Among the Studios," Our Young Folks, 2 (July 1866), 396-97. The engraving showed fourmen
not three. For minstrel-style contraband humor in
and abolitionist publications,
resting outside the tent,
Republican
see "Editor's Drawer,"
23 (Aug. 1861), 428; "Editor's Drawer,"
ibid., 25 (June
Harper's New Monthly Magazine,
1862), 134; "Editors Drawer," ibid., 26 (May 1863), 858; "Humors of the Day," Harper's Weekly, Feb. 8, 1862, p.
83; "The Lounger," ibid.,May 2, 1863, p. 274; vignettes in theNational Anti-Slavery Standards "Sable Clouds" col
umn, 1861 and 1862; Moore, Anecdotes, Poetry and Incidents of theWar, 76,141-42,225-26,253,
301-2,458,464,
in
Iowa Journal
52 (Jan. 1954), 66; andWilliam
467; "An IowaWoman
1861-1865,"
Washington, D.C.,
ofHistory,
Cullen Bryant II, ed., "A Yankee Soldier Looks at theNegro," Civil War History, 7 Qune 1961), 136-37, 139-40.
36
For the doll, see "American Art and Artists," Christian Examiner, 77 (Sept. 1864), 183. For illustrations of
contrabands dancing, seeWinslow Homer, "A Bivouac Fire on the Potomac," Harper's Weekly, Dec. 21, 1861, pp.
808-9; Robert Knox Sneden, The Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey (New York, 2000),
134; and "The Banks Ex
Musical
and Terpsichorean Entertainment at the U.S. Arsenal, Baton Rouge," Frank Leslie's
pedition?Extempore
Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 31, 1863, p. 292. On the reception of slaves' music, see Ronald Radano,
"Denoting Dif
ference: The Writing of the Slave Spirituals," Critical Inquiry, 22 (Spring 1996), 509; and Sherrill V. Martin, "Music
of Black Americans during theWar Years," in Feel the Spirit: Studies inNineteenth-Century Afro-American Music,
ed. George R Keck and Sherrill V. Martin
(New York, 1988), 1-16. On whites' admiring but racially essential
ist attitudes toward black music, see Lott, Love and Theft; Karen M. Adams, "The Black Image in the Paintings of
William
Sidney Mount," American Art Journal, 7 (Nov. 1975), 42-59; Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals:
to the Civil War (Urbana, 1977); and Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music
Black Folk Music
(Chicago,
2003).
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1070
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
ostensibly by) contrabands, especially in 1861 and 1862, illuminates Northerners' keen
interest in representing and defining the soon to be freed. The characteristics Northerners
attributed to contrabands, inmusic as elsewhere, revealed their own divergent predictions
about
consequences.
emancipation's
The proliferation of contraband music began with the encounter between fugitive
slaves and white antislavery activists. Early white visitors to Fortress Monroe
described
a
of
entranced
the
Lewis
minister
the
and
and
slaves,
Lockwood,
by
singing
being
fugitive
to travel south to work
the first representative of theAmerican Missionary Association
with slaves, reported on "a prime deliverance melody" whose refrainwas "Let my people
was titled Go Down, Moses; or, The
go." At the behest of Lockwood and others, that song
in
the
the
Contrabands,
widely printed
Song of
Republican and antislavery press, and pub
lished as a parlor music arrangement inDecember
1861. Although themusic historian
Dena J. Epstein criticized the arrangement as unfaithful to the actual tones and cadences
its publication as parlor music, however
of the song as itwas sung at Fortress Monroe,
domesticated, gave Northerners a chance to bring "the song of the contrabands" into their
homes. The song's impact is suggested by appropriations and parodies of its chorus, "Let
my people go," in both antislavery songs and Democratic ones that twisted the refrain for
antiemancipation,
antiblack
purposes.37
Activists quickly put Go Down, Moses and other music by and about virtuous contra
bands to service in theirmovement to aid the fugitives. To them, the song's message of
liberation ("tellKing Pharaoh, to letmy people go!") constituted evidence of slaves' desire
for freedom and refutedwidespread suspicions that the enslaved were happy as theywere.
The song's biblical theme also announced the fleeing slaves' Christian faith and thus their
or songster, The
tomoral
movement
susceptibility
uplift. One
Harp ofFreedom,
songbook,
was
to "be sung by themillion, in order
in
in
Boston
March
1862,
published
designed
to awaken a deep interest in behalf of the 'Contrabands.'" The booklet printed Go Down,
Moses alongside a song titledOh, Help theContraband, whose eight verses describe contra
bands coming north, willing towork and happy to taste freedom. The song concludes
No more the stinging lash;
No more the awful brand
But knowledge, freedom, home, and Cash,
every
"contraband."
We
come,
we
come,
we
We
come,
we
come
our
For
come
with
liberty
to
joy
to meet
you,
gain.38
37
For Lewis Lockwood's
12,
report, see "Mission to the Contrabands," National Anti-Slavery Standard, Oct.
see "Contraband
For
1861. For an earlier report on slaves' singing at Fortress Monroe,
Singing," ibid., Sept. 7, 1861.
Freedom Hymn,"
ibid., Dec. 21, 1861. For the
twenty verses of the song, plus the chorus, see "The Contrabands'
"O LetMy People Go" (New York, 1861);
musical arrangement, see Thomas Baker, arr., The Song of theContrabands.
and Harp ofFreedom (Parti) (New York, 1862), 2-3. A twelve-verse "parody," using the same verse structure, urged
Its refrainwas, "Then go down, freemen, Away down to Dixie's land, And
the government to speed emancipation.
tell Uncle Sam To letmy people go." Ibid. For another antislavery parody, see "Let the Bondmen Go!," National
a
to those who are partial to Contraband
parody "Dedicated
Anti-Slavery Standard, Jan. 18, 1862. For Democratic
as the
see "O. Let Those
Melodies,"
People Go," Vanity Fair, Feb. 8, 1862, p. 68. Music historians regard the song
first spiritual to be transcribed for a Northern audience. Other contemporary songs that incorporated variations
of the chorus "let my people go" include G. F.Wurzel
(Chicago, 1862); and
[pseud.], De Day ob Liberty's Comin
see
Manuel
Fenollosa, Emancipation Hymn: Quartette & Chorus (Boston, 1863). On Lockwood at Fortress Monroe,
Continen
Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, 4-14; and "Oh! Let My People Go. The Song of the Contrabands,"
talMonthly, 2 (July 1862), 112-13. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 247-49.
38
see "The Harp of Freedom," advertisement, National Anti
Harp ofFreedom, 27. For the goals of the songster,
New York Times, March 22, 1862.
Slavery Standard, April 5, 1862; and "The Harp of Freedom," advertisement,
This content downloaded from 138.16.128.116 on Wed, 22 May 2013 13:50:04 PM
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TheWord
"Contraband" and theMeanings
A variety of contraband
songs were published
Figure 7.
with the antislavery movement,
such as this one, whose
of Emancipation
as sheet music.
words
Some were
were written
1071
associated
by the abolitionist
poet JohnGreenleafWhittier. The "Contraband" of Port Royal, poetry byJohnG. Whittier,
music
by Ferdinand
Mayer
(Boston,
and Special CollectionsLibrary.
1862).
Courtesy
Duke
University,
Rare
Book, Manuscript,
By ascribing to the contrabands the ideals expected of the Northern middle class, the
song encouraged itsNorthern singers to see escaping slaves as citizens in the making,
attributed to slaves or authored by
potentially productive members of society.Whether
Northern activists, "contraband songs" of the antislavery movement sought to gener
to
ate sympathy and to spur activism. They brought Southern slaves
figuratively closer
Northerners by suggesting that theirmusic and their values could be assimilated into
Northern
culture.
lines and renditions of their music also in
The flight of enslaved people to Union
to compose minstrel-style contraband songs designed for an au
white
spired
songwriters
dience outside the antislavery movement. Songs featuring "contraband" in the title and
as sheet music included Ole
Shady; or, The Song of the Contraband, Intelligent
published
Contraband, and The Old Contraband.
(See figures 7 and 8.) Songsters associated with
minstrel performers and theaters likewise featured songs about emancipation, often sung
from the supposed perspective of a fugitive or contraband. Historians ofminstrelsy, most
of whom focus on the antebellum period, have given little attention to such minstrel
music. But the sheer number of songs featuring contraband characters?published
and
an
in
them
the
North
and
the
South?makes
important
performed throughout thewar,
subset of Civil War popular song.39
39
For sheet music,
see
1861); Char
Benjamin R?ssel Hanby, Ole Shady; or, The Song of theContraband(Boston,
lie Pettengill, Intelligent Contraband
(Boston, 1865); John L. Zieber, The Old Contraband: Song and Chorus (Phila
on de
Way: Freedman's
delphia, 1865); A. J.Higgins, The Contrabands Jubilee (Chicago, 1862); George F. Root, Tse
1865); David A. Warden, Sherman's on the
Song (Chicago, 1864); M. B. Leavitt, The Southern Contraband(Boston,
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1072 The Journal ofAmerican History
8. The
bodily and facial features
exaggerated
Figure
of blackface
this song sheet cover reflect conventions
March
of the contraband
minstrelsy.
migrant
The Old Contra
2007
on
band. Song and Chorus, words byfohnL. Zieber, music byRudolphWittig (Philadel
fohnHay Library,SheetMusic Collection.
phia, 1865). CourtesyBrown University,
as
were present in the
popular lexicon and music of the Confederacy
well. Southern white writers seem to have reserved the termfor slaves who had run away
toUnion lines,whereas Northerners used the termmore broadly to refer to all slaves who
Contrabands
came into contact with Union forces. Evoking the proslavery idea thatAfrican Americans
were best off under the supposedly paternalistic watch of slaveholders, white Southerners
1865); J.Young, Darky Sam (Brooklyn, 1866); andWill S. Hays,
Song and Chorus (Philadelphia,
and Popular Negro Song and Chorus (New York, 1867). For songsters, see Bob Hart's Plantation
Brower's Black Diamond
Songster and Ebony Jester (New
Songster (New York, 1862), 5, 6-7; Frank Brower, Frank
York, 1863), 9-10, 16, 46; Frank B. Converse, Frank Converses Old Cremona Songster (New York, 1863), 9-10, 33,
s
47-48; Buckley Melodist
(Boston, 1864), 23-24; E. Byron Christy, Purdys Paul Pry Songster, and Black Joker (New
York, 1865), 5-6, 21-22, 30-32, 55-56; Billy Holmes Comic Local Lyrics (New York, 1866), 41; Frank Dumont,
Johnny Cross*Original Pontoon Songster (New York, 1867), 37-38; and Billy Cotton, Billy Cottons LivelyMoke Song
ster (New York, 1870), 5-6. Among historians of minstrelsy, Robert Toll looked most closely at theCivil War North;
and antiabolitionist and argued that the war pushed minstrel per
he characterized minstrel shows as Democratic
formers to refocus their shows on the travails of white people. See Toll, Blacking Up, 104-33.
Track. Contraband
Little Sam: A New
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"Contraband" and theMeanings
TheWord
of Emancipation
1073
tended to represent contrabands as destitute or endangered inUnion camps or as happi
est back at home, in slavery.Minstrel contraband songs were published and performed in
the Confederacy, a testament to the ubiquity of the contraband figure and to thewhite
Souths increasing interest inminstrelsy during the Civil War.40
As inmost antebellum minstrel songs, a black man speaking in dialect narrated the
minstrel-style contraband songs of the Civil War. Northern contraband songs mingled
or pretension with sentimental
jokes about slave ignorance
renderings of the narrator's
to reunite with lost familymembers, to see his former owner taken down a peg,
yearning
be free. In mixing ridicule with respect, the songs were consistent
and?ultimately?to
with a minstrel tradition that, as Eric Lott has persuasively argued for the antebellum pe
riod, was a complex cultural form that expressed not just white racism but also strands
of desire and identification.41 The wartime flight of slaves toUnion lines and the flexible
term "contraband" added new grist for the genre. By definition,
fugitives from slavery
as
content
vision
of
antebellum
slaves
with
minstrelsy's
simple lives in the pas
challenged
toral South. Minstrel contraband songs reinforced ideas about inherent racial difference
by emphasizing the slaves' supposed dialect and, in illustrated song sheets, supposed phe
notypic differences from whites. Yet contraband narrators who, like real escapees, took
dramatic risks to become free, exalted in liberation, and professed loyalty to the Union
cause
encouraged
Northern
to reconsider
audiences
their
preconception
that
slaves
were
fundamentally different from the ostensibly freedom-loving Northern white working
class. In the changed context?in which black men could aspire tomilitary service and
citizenship?male minstrel characters who longed to see theirwives and children, enlisted
in the army, or sought work in theNorth raised the possibility that black men desired,
and could achieve, mainstream ideals of political and social manhood.
Most minstrel contraband songs commented on current events but then faded from
more
popular memory. A few, however, had
staying power. The song Kingdom Coming
the
and
exemplifies
geographical mobility
complex meanings that wartime contraband
accrue.
could
The
songs
song, composed by the white midwestern songwriter Henry
C. Work, was introduced in the spring of 1862 by the renowned Christy's Minstrels,
a troupe of white men who
performed in blackface. Its narrator describes (in supposed
Southern black dialect) a plantation owner's panicked flight from home as the Yankees
invade.
The
lyrics portray
the cowardice
of a sun-darkened
slave
owner:
He drill somuch dey call him Cap an,
An he get so dreffel tann'd,
I spec he tryan' fool dem Yankees
For
to tink he's
contraband.
40
include Charles Young, The only Genuine and
Minstrel-style contraband songs published in the Confederacy
Reliable Contraband Schottische (New Orleans,
1863); Billy Emerson, TheHappy Contraband (New Orleans,
1864);
. ..
E. A. Benson, Poor Oppressed; or, The Contraband Schottisch (Nashville, 1862); We're
Coming Fodder Abraham
by
an
(Nashville, n.d.); and J. Rud Adam, The Contraband's Hotel (Nashville, 1862). On the
"Intelligent Contraband"
growth of blackface minstrelsy in the Confederacy, see Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation ofConfederate Nationalism:
Ideology and Identity in theCivil War South (Baton Rouge, 1988), 65?69. For typical Confederate
representations of
"contrabands," see ibid., 63; "News from the Fleet," Charleston Mercury, July 10, 1862; "The Negros inMcClellans
at
ibid, Aug. 8, 1862; "The Contrabands
ibid, Jan. 12, 1863; and "From Norfolk," ibid,
Camp,"
Washington,"
and Faust,
April 20, 1864. On Confederate
"intelligent contraband" humor, see Fahs, Imagined Civil War, 217?18;
Creation ofConfederate Nationalism,
67. For "contraband" as a "Yankee" term, see diary of
Joseph Addison Waddell,
July 2, 1863, in Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in theAmerican Civil War, ed. Edward L. Ayers, http://valley
.vcdh.virginia.edu/.
41
Lott, Love and Theft, 18-20.
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1074
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
image of a plantation owner trying to pass as contraband is consistent with the sense
of racialized subversion so often implicit in the term "contraband." The war has turned
the planter into a desperate fugitive and the slaves intomasters of the plantation. In sub
sequent verses, the liberated slaves move into the owner's house, raid his kitchen, and lock
the overseer in the cellar as they revel in their freedom.42
The
Kingdom Coming enjoyed enormous popularity, selling more than 20,000 copies in its
first seven months. White people who sang the song gave voice to the feelings of libera
tion and celebration thatWork had put in the narrator's mouth. Indeed,
considering its
more
have
done
than
the
abolitionist
contraband
songs
popularity, Kingdom Coming may
to introduce white
people to the excitement and upheaval accompanying the advent of
freedom to the South. The chorus ran
De
massa
run? ha,
ha!
De darkey stay?ho, ho!
Itmus' be now de kingdom comin,
An' de year ob Jubilo!
Union soldiers, both black and white, carried Kingdom Coming to the South, and South
ernAfrican Americans
adopted it, sang it, changed thewords, and sometimes took credit
into the twentieth century, African Americans
in the South sang
for its creation. Well
a testament to the
music
minstrel
be appropriated
could
Kingdom Coming,
complex ways
and transformed. The song, sometimes subtitled The Contraband s Song, also continued
as a minstrel tune.43
to be
published
music
thus proposed a variety of contraband protagonists, from the exotic yet
Popular
Christian singer of Go Down, Moses to the ideal free laborer of Oh, Help the Contraband
to the caricatured
figures of many minstrel songs. At any moment, the dynamics of per
formance and reception shaped the songs' meanings. Kingdom Coming, for example, had
different valences when sung by white minstrels in blackface forwhite Northern audi
ences, by former slaves for one another, or by former slaves for a white Northern audi
ence?all
North?nascent
of which
happened.
spirituals,
In all genres of contraband
abolitionist
served as a proxy for people's
with their freedom.
songs,
or minstrel
fantasies about who
songs that circulated
songs?the
contraband
slaves were and what
in the
figure
theywould
do
42
Henry C. Work, Kingdom Coming (Chicago, 1862).
43
On the popularity of Kingdom Coming, see Dena
J. Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago before 1871: The
Firm ofRoot & Cady (Detroit, 1969), 45?46. On transmission of the song by soldiers, see Kenneth A. Bernard,
Lincoln and theMusic of theCivil War (Caldwell, 1966), 99-100, 294, 295, 296, 299; J.R.M. to Editor, SongMes
senger of theNorth-West, 1 (Aug. 1863), 78; J.R.M. to Editor, ibid. (Nov. 1863), 126-27. For evidence that the
song was also published and performed by minstrels in the South, see Richard Harwell, Confederate Music
(Chapel
125. For contemporary reports of slaves singing Kingdom Coming, see "How the Slaves Receive
Hill, 1950), 89-90,
ibid. (Aug. 1863),
Our Troops," SongMessenger of theNorth-West, 1 (July 1863), 57; "The Contraband's Kingdom,"
66?67. For retrospective reports, see Old Southern Songs of the Period of the Confederacy: The Dixie Trophy Collec
E. Barton, Old Plantation
tion; Compiled byKate E. Staton, Tarboro, N.C
(New York, 1926), 101-2; andWilliam
singing the song, see Henry M.
Hymns (Boston, 1899), 25. On twentieth-century Southern African Americans
Beiden and Arthur Palmer Hudson,
eds., The Frank C Brown Collection ofNorth Carolina Folklore (7 vols., Dur
II, 541-43; George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (19 vols.,
ham, 1952-1964),
I.White, American Negro
232; and Newman
1972), II, part 2, p. 197, IV, part 2, pp. 28-29, XVIII,
Westport,
1928), 170-71. On continuing publication o?Kingdom Coming as a minstrel song,
Folk-Songs (Cambridge, Mass.,
seeMinstrel Songs, Old and New (Boston, 1882), 180-81; Albert E. Wier, ed., Songs of the Sunny South (New York,
research, Dena
(New York, 1910), 50-51. Inmeticulous
1929), 27; andT. T. Burleigh, ed., Negro Minstrel Melodies
in
inChicago
J. Epstein found no evidence thatKingdom Coming had existed as a slave song before its publication
1862. Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago, 45-46.
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TheWord
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1075
As the federal government shifted from a policy of upholding slavery to one of eman
men as soldiers, new narrative
possibilities opened for
cipating slaves and enlisting black
1862
Americans
debated
whether
black men should
contrabands.
Throughout
imagined
be allowed to serve in the Union army in combat roles, knowing that if they did, their
to eventual citizenship would be shortened. The military's employment of African
path
American women and men contrabands as laborers had engendered little public debate.
For more than a century,warring powers in theUnited States and throughout theWest
ern
men
Hemisphere had employed enslaved laborers in supporting roles. Arming black
was farmore controversial. In theUnited States, the prospect of black enlistment in the
Union cause challenged prevailing ideas about African Americans' roles in both war and
peace. Most Northern white people believed (despite contrary evidence from earlier con
flicts) that black men, especially those who had been enslaved, could not accommodate
themselves tomilitary discipline and lacked the courage required for soldiering. In addi
tion, because republican governments had historically linkedmilitary servicewith citizen
men would increase the likelihood that,
ship rights,Northerners knew that arming black
once thewar was over, black men could claim the political and civil
rights of citizens. As
the historian Laurent Dubois has written, when military conflicts in theWestern Hemi
sphere raised the possibility of arming large numbers of slaves, "many whites feared, with
men of African descent in themilitary undermined and
good reason, that the presence of
threatened racial hierarchy."44
Black leaderswere especially vocal in urging the Lincoln administration to accept black
men as soldiers, a move thatwould
to
strengthen their claims
citizenship after thewar.
As a source of military manpower, black laborers within Union
lines loomed large in
their campaign. Yet the emphasis on the passivity and na?vet? of contrabands conflicted
with the vision of such men as soldiers. In a January 1862 address, Frederick Douglass
chastised the Lincoln administration for seeing fleeing slaves as contrabands, not sol
diers. "TheWashington Government wants men for its army, but thus far, ithas not had
the boldness
slave
an
article
to recognize themanhood
of commerce?a
of the race towhich
contraband."
Douglass
I belong.
contrasted
It only sees in the
the government
s use
of "contraband"?which,
he believed, implied that slaves were passive or inert?with his
own vision of ex-slave soldiers as avatars of racial manhood. The poet JamesMadison Bell
envisioned the transformation of contrabands into "men" in an 1862 poem titled, "What
ShallWe Do with the Contrabands?"
"I would not have thewrath of the rebels to cease,"
Bell wrote,
Till theContrabands join in securing a peace,
Whose glory shall vanish the last galling chain,
And
win
for their
race
an
undying
respect.
The poem urged the conversion of passive contrabands into active soldiers
a
striking
blow for their own freedom. Rather than suggest what "we" should do with the con
trabands, Bell insisted that they must do for themselves. The contrabands must fight
44
Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 225. For a comparative discussion, see Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D.
Modern Age (New Haven, 2006). For slave labor in otherWest
Morgan, Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the
ern
Hemisphere wars, see Frey,Water from theRock, esp. 121-22; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 230, 261, 296-97;
Rothman, Slave Country, 148-50; Roger N. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795
1815 (New Haven,
1979), 5; and Peter M. Voelz, Slave and Soldier: TheMilitary Impact of Blacks in the Colonial
Americas (New York, 1993), 59-65.
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1076
to
The Journal ofAmerican History
from
"purge
their
race
. . .The
stigma
and
scorn
now
men
March 2007
attending
the
slave."
Given
the
contrabands would show their
opportunity, advocates of black enlistment argued,
real mettle; as they helped secure a Union victory, theywould lay the groundwork for
incorporation
into
the nation
as citizens.
Women
too
could
be
citizens,
but
ex-slave
men's
service, which
military
represented sacrifice for the nation and independent action, gave
them a special platform fromwhich to claim new (and gendered)
rights.45
Black recruitment to theUnion army began during 1862 and was legitimated by the
Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863. Those developments
context for
use of the term "contraband."
popular
changed the
Republicans
seeking to
more permanent basis of
the
emphasize
emancipation began self-consciously replacing
"contraband" with "freedman" and occasionally with "freedpeople." Colloquially, how
ever, inmilitary circles, inminstrelsy and other forms of popular culture, and in everyday
language, "contraband" persisted well beyond January 1863. The government continued
to
issue
"contraband
rations";
the
army
continued
to
operate
"contraband
camps."
The
dictionary institutionalized the new definition of contraband
("a negro slave") and explained thatGen. Benjamin Butler had invented the definition in
1861. As the dictionary suggested, the new definition of "contraband" had transcended
the vicissitudes of policy and continued, in the popular lexicon, to evoke ideas about slav
1864 edition ofWebster's
ery, emancipation,
race,
and
dependence.46
After the Emancipation
Proclamation, many white writers and artists followed the
lead of the black activists Douglass
and Bell in adopting a contraband-to-soldier narra
tive.White writers and artists, however, often suggested thatwhite people made the con
traband's transformation possible. In Louisa May Alcott's short story "My Contraband,"
a white woman nurse meets "her" contraband, Robert, in an army
to
hospital and tries
reform him. She gives him a Bible and sends him to Boston, well known as the head
quarters of abolitionism. The nurse's pedagogical effortspay off, as Robert enrolls in the
Fifty-fourthMassachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, prepared tomake the ultimate
sacrifice for the nation. The story represents Robert as transformed from contraband into
man by his embrace of Christian morality and military enlistment. All that remains is for
him to prove himself on the battlefield, which he does at FortWagner,
45
South Carolina.47
on theWar"; JamesMadison
"The Great Speech, Frederick Douglass
Bell, "What ShallWe Do with theCon
trabands?," inBlack Abolitionist Papers, ?d. Ripley et al., V, 138-39. For other representations of the trajectory from
to soldier to redeemer of the race, see Junius to Editor, Christian Recorder, May 23, 1863; and Williams,
fugitive
History of theNegro Troops in theWar of theRebellion. For gendered differences in citizenship possibilities for former
societies as well, military ser
slaves, see Cooper, Holt, and Scott, Beyond Slavery, 17-18. In other postemancipation
vice by enslaved men buttressed their claims to citizenship. See Dubois, Colony ofCitizens, 224-27',
150, 160-62,
192-94; and Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898
1999), 37-42,
(Chapel Hill,
125-26.
46
Noah Webster, A Dictionary of theEnglish Language (Springfield, Mass.,
1864), 285. A current definition for
"contraband" is "a slave who during theAmerican Civil War escaped to or was brought within theUnion
lines," ac
toMerriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, http://m-w.com/dictionary/contraband.
For "contraband rations,"
cording
see Col. John Eaton to Gen. O. O. Howard,
June 22, 1865, Letters Sent, vol. 1,DC Asst. Comr., Records of the
and Second
Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned
Lands, rg 105 (National Archives, Washington,
D.C.);
Annual Report of theWestern Freedmen's Aid Commission, Cincinnati, Ohio (Cincinnati, 1865), 10.
47
The storywas first published as "The Brothers," a title chosen by the editor ofthe Atlantic Monthly>. In personal
to the story as "the 'Contraband'";
itwas republished as "My Contra
correspondence Louisa May Alcott referred
band"; inHospital Sketches; And Camp and Fireside Stories, by Louisa May Alcott (Boston, 1869). Louisa May Al
theNation: Women's
cott, "The Brothers," Atlantic Monthly, 12 (Nov. 1863), 584-95; Elizabeth Young, Disarming
Writing and theAmerican Civil War (Chicago, 1999), 329n64.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
TheWord
Figure
"Contraband" and theMeanings
9. Thomas
Waterman
Wood,
of Emancipation
The Recruit.
Oil
1077
on canvas,
1866. TheMetropolitan Museum ofArt, Gift ofCharles Stewart
Smith, 1884 (84.12b). Image ? TheMetropolitanMuseum ofArt.
A series of paintings by Thomas Waterman Wood
also dramatized the imagined transi
tion from contraband to soldier and potential citizen.Wood, well known in his era as a
scenes from everyday life, spent much of the Civil War
painter of portraits and narrative
in Louisville, Kentucky, where he painted a series now known as A Bit ofWarHistory, (See
cover and
in 1866, were exhibited by
figures 9 and 10.) The three paintings, completed
the prestigious National Academy of Design inNew York and reproduced as woodcuts in
a man
arriving in a pro
Harpers Weekly. The first painting, titled The Contraband, shows
vost marshals office carrying a walking stick and a small
of
bag
belongings. He raises his
hat in a deferential greeting. A rifle and other soldier s accoutrements rest against a chair.
The second, The Recruit, finds theman in soldier s uniform, with the rifle over his shoul
der.With his left leg bent, he takes a more aggressive stance than the contraband in the
on crutches with one
firstpainting. In the last, The Veteran, theman?now
legmissing?
salutes with his hand, a sign of allegiance to the nation he has sacrificed to defend.48
The paintings suggest thatmilitary service endows the contraband with manhood and
that as a veteran theman is due respect. Indeed, the veteran smissing limb symbolizes the
compact of citizenship: men who make sacrifices for the nation are rewarded with rights.
48
"The Contraband,
Thomas Waterman Wood,
Recruit, and Veteran," Harper's Weekly, May 4, 1867, p. 284;
et al., American
ofArt (3 vols., New York, 1985), II, 196?
Paintings in theMetropolitan Museum
Spassky
Natalie
99.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
1078 The Journal ofAmerican History
Figure
10. Thomas
Waterman
Wood,
The Veteran.
March
Oil
2007
on canvas,
1866. TheMetropolitan Museum ofArt, Gift ofCharles Stewart
Smith, 1884 (84.12c). Image ? TheMetropolitanMuseum ofArt.
And yet the series also suggests an ambivalence typical of white progressives' representa
tions of the transformation from contraband to citizen. The veteran, disabled or even
emasculated, cannot be the autonomous individual so important to contemporary visions
to veteran, remains liter
citizenship. The slave, transmuted through soldier
on a "crutch" tomove forward. Only themiddle
and
ally
figure,
figuratively dependent
the soldier, represents the self-sufficient ideal citizen. Nor did Alcott find a way to envi
sion postwar citizenship for her contraband character. Robert dies a heroic death in South
Carolina, thus freeingAlcott from any need to propose a role for emancipated people in
the nations future.
While black enlistment created new opportunities to imagine contrabands as soldiers
of masculine
and future citizens, it also placed Northern African American men in a new and often
difficult relationship to Southern contrabands. Many Northern black soldiers had no
firsthand knowledge of the South and considered slavery both unfamiliar and horrific.
Military service brought thousands of them into direct contact with slaves, pushing the
Northerners to reconsider how theywere both connected to and different from those just
black noncommissioned
officer in
emerging from bondage. James Henry Gooding?a
in
New
before
who
had
the
theMassachusetts
lived
Bedford, Massachusetts,
Fifty-fourth
a
to
contra
war?wrote
New
Bedford
"The
from Beaufort, South Carolina,
newspaper,
bands did not believe we were coming; one of them said, T nebber bleeve black Yankee
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TheWord
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1079
sure
comee here help culer men.' They think now the
enough." Like
kingdom is coming
wrote
American
of
soldiers, Gooding
many African
newly emancipated peo
admiringly
as I have seen, they appear to understand the causes of thewar better than a
ple. "So far
great many Northern editors," he commented, even as his rendering of the contrabands'
dialect emphasized their difference from him.49
In letters destined for publication in newspapers, Northern black soldiers serving in
the South frequently referred to the black civilians they encountered as contrabands, typi
cally without using devices such as quotation marks to qualify their use of the term. Black
soldiers' easy adoption of the term "contraband" was undoubtedly shaped by the term's
were also immersed in a military culture inwhich
ubiquity in the North. The soldiers
"contraband" served to distinguish black men who worked as civilian laborers from those
who worked as soldiers.
African American soldiers had a complicated relationship to the contraband laborers
who built fortifications, dug trenches, and managed supply trains alongside them.White
officers, loath to recognize the distinction between black soldiers and black civilian labor
ers, often assigned black soldiers tomanual labor never required ofwhite soldiers. More
over, contrabands were commonly understood as themost interchangeable and degraded
of laborers. For black soldiers, then, emphasizing the distance between themselves and ci
vilian laborers became a way of demanding respect for their service. The practical impor
tance of such a distinction became
especially clear when, in June 1863, the secretary ofwar
be paid $10 per month, less $3 worth of clothing, a
than
the
less
13
$
per month paid towhite soldiers. In September 1863,
salary significantly
President
Lincoln
about the issue. "Now themain question is,Are we
addressed
Gooding
he asked rhetorically. "We of thisRegt, were not enlisted
Soldiers, or arewe Labourers?"
under any contraband' act," he insisted, referring to the July 1862 Militia Act, which had
established the rate of pay forAfrican American military employees at $10 monthly.50
announced
that black soldiers would
Yet Gooding demonstrated respect for the work of contraband laborers. "We do not
wish to be understood, as rating our Service, ofmore Value to theGovernment, than the
service of the exslave," he wrote. "Their Service is undoubtedly worth much to theNa
tion, but Congress made express, provision touching their case, as slaves freed bymilitary
insisted. "Freemen from birth, and consequently,
necessity." "Not so with us," Gooding
the
of
and
acting for ourselves, so far as the Laws would al
having
advantage
thinking,
low us.We do not consider ourselves fit subjects for the Contraband act."51 In his protest
49
to Editors, June 8, 1863, in On theAltar
James Henry Gooding
ofFreedom: A Black Soldier's Civil War Letters
from theFront, ed. Virginia M. Adams (New York, 1992), 26-27. Other examples of northern black soldiers' use of
"contraband" to refer,often sympathetically, to slaves within Union
lines include G.E.S.,
letter,Nov. 20, 1862, in
Grand Army ofBlack Men, ed. Redkey, 22-23; William Waring,
letter,Feb. 15, 1865, ibid, 75; A. J. Bedfold, letter,
Nov. 7, 1864, ibid., 150. See also G.E.S.,
letter,Christian Recorder, April 9, 1864; John H. W N. Collins to Editor,
ibid.,May 20, 1865; andWm. T. Fountain to Brother Weaver,
ibid., May 28, 1864.
50
ser. 2, vol. Ill: The Black
Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History
ofEmancipation,
Military Ex
For contrabands as degraded laborers, see Berlin et al., eds., Freedom, ser. 1,
perience (New York, 1982), 385-86.
vol. II, 251-53, 256, 266-68, 293, 298-99, 305-6. For the assignment of black soldiers tomanual
labor, seeWil
liams,History of theNegro Troops in theWar of theRebellion, 162-66; Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil
War Alliance ofBlack Soldiers and White
182-85; and Oliver, dev, Civil War
Officers (1990; Baton Rouge, 2000),
CD-ROM:War
ser. 1, vol. XLI, no. 2, p. 566, ser. 1, vol. XXVIII,
no. 2, p. 95. On the pay controversy,
of theRebellion,
see Berlin et al., eds., Freedom, ser. 2, vol. Ill, 363, 388-89, 362-68; Herman Belz, "Law, Politics, and Race in the
and Glatthaar, Forged
Struggle for Equal Pay during the Civil War," Civil War History, 22 (Sept. 1976), 197-213;
in Battle, 169-76.
51
Berlin et al., eds., Freedom, ser. 2, vol. Ill, 386.
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1080
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
a tentative line between those who had been free before thewar and for
Gooding drew
mer slaves who, he
tomake decisions as
suggested, had lacked opportunities
independent
actors and therefore did not merit the same pay as "freemen." His argument for
equal pay
excluded the great many black soldiers who had been enslaved at the beginning of the
war, including those of four South Carolina regiments stationed not far from theMas
sachusetts Fifty-fourth.
even as he insisted that "free
to
Gooding's effort honor the labor of the contrabands
men from birth" deserved more pay
term
suggested both the difficulty and utility of the
"contraband" forAfrican Americans who had been free at the war's outset. During the
war and at least into the Reconstruction
period, African Americans used the term to dis
newcomers from old residents, to allude to poverty and need, and sometimes to
tinguish
draw distinctions in religious and cultural traditions. For example, in 1866 theNorthern
black teacher Rebecca Primus reported fromMaryland's Eastern Shore that local whites
. . . sufficient
refused to pay "colored men & women
wages & if the people will not ac
as
terms
send
off
and
their
cept
get contrabands,'
they are here denominated." For
they
as
an important distinction be
for
"contraband"
marked
black
Primus,
observers,
many
tween local black people and recently emancipated migrants. Ifwhite people used the
proximity of unemployed contrabands to justify paying longtime black residents poorly,
the black residents themselves saw the contrabands as a threat to their economic liveli
W. E. B. Du Bois, who was born in 1868, recalled that the "contra
hood. Much
later,
"on the whole were well
bands'" who had migrated to his hometown inMassachusetts,
received" by the small and long-standing local black population. Yet he remembered that
"the older group" of black residents "held some of its social distinctions and the newcom
we sometimes
ers astonished us by
a
forming littleNegro Methodist Zion Church, which
attended."52
"Contraband"
remained
a contested
term
among
African
Americans,
perhaps
nowhere
than in the nation's capital, where thousands of escapees settled among an African
American community thatwas already, in 1860, largely free and relatively prosperous. In
the 1870s the black journalist John E. Bruce lambasted the local black elite for its treat
more
ment
of "contrabands."
"The
poor
and
despised
Jew,
was
never
more
abused
and
berated,
scorned and ridiculed thanwere the contrabands' ofwar," Bruce wrote in his description
Itwas the contrabands, Bruce
of class relations among African Americans inWashington.
in school, and who were
were
whose
children
excelled
who
forward
contended,
thinking,
"to a large extent frugal and economical people." Extending the tradition?begun
by such
as bearers of ideal masculine
men as
male
contrabands
Bell?of
and
elevating
Douglass
wrote that "the contraband" was "a model working man, a faithful and
qualities, Bruce
a
the owner of right smart horse sense?
good citizen, devoted husband and father?and
a
never
more
than the dispised, abused and
God
made
perfect type of honest manhood
52
Rebecca Primus to "Parents &C Sister," April 7, 1866, in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends, ed. Griffin, 118;
E. Burghardt DuBois, Dusk ofDawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; New Bruns
in quotation marks. For objections by formerly free
wick, 1984), 15. In this passage Du Bois placed "contraband"
blacks to being treated like "contrabands" by military forces, see Berlin et al., eds., Freedom, ser. 1, vol. II, 273?75,
ser. 1, vol. Ill:
and Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History ofEmancipation,
307, 313?14;
296?97,
TheWartime Genesis ofFree Labor: The Lower South (New York, 1990), 570. For other examples of African Ameri
cans' use of "contraband" to draw distinctions, see "Contrabands," Christian Recorder, April 5, 1862; W
J.Davis to
Bro. Weaver,
Iowa," ibid., April 18, 1863; and S. M. Giles to Editor,
ibid., Nov. 15, 1862; "Letter from Keokuk,
ibid, Nov. 21, 1863.
W
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TheWord
"Contraband" and theMeanings
of Emancipation
1081
badly treated contraband.'" In honoring contrabands, Bruce was fighting powerful cur
rents, present among some African Americans as well as whites, that identified contra
bands with passivity, poverty, and lack of sophistication.53
African Americans thus adopted the term "contraband" as a medium
inwhich to ex
press themeanings of differences between the newly freed and those who had been free
in the aid movement
before the war. As Northern African Americans
recognized, the
racism of the broader society tended to force black people together, encouraging them
to see distinctions as far less important than the
collectivity. Nonetheless, differences of
and
with
status,
experience
religion, regional origin,
slavery were important, particularly
as
one
of
the
obliterated
differences
starkest
among African Americans,
emancipation
that between slave and free.When Northern African Americans used "contraband" to set
themselves apart from the group so identified, descriptions of difference often shaded into
suggestions of their own superiority, not of race, but of education and experience. Writ
ers such as Bell and Bruce were likewise interested in the contrabands' distinctiveness, but
they portrayed contrabands, not as objects of philanthropy, but as heroic agents of racial
destiny. Possessed of preternatural bravery and integrity,Bell's and Bruces contrabands
would light the path to citizenship and vindicate the manhood of the entire race. The
myriad connotations African Americans gave to "contraband" (and their choices ofwhen
and how to use the term) thus reflected a struggle to give linguistic expression to tensions
between group identity and difference newly delineated at themoment of emancipation.
Class differences among African Americans would later become more visible and the lan
guage of class more straightforward. For the time being, "contraband" was a shorthand
that could suggest a variety of differences without naming them
explicitly.54
Among politically active Republicans, use of the term "contraband" declined follow
Proclamation. Although the proclamation
ing the promulgation of the Emancipation
states
in
in parts of the Confederacy, and
enslaved
and
exempted
people
loyal
although
itwas not enforceable inConfederate-held areas, itmarked a watershed inUnion
policy,
for
it forecast
permanent
emancipation
and
a new,
more
secure
status
for escapees
from
slavery.White and black Republicans now strove to replace the indeterminacy of "contra
band" with the permanence of "freedman." Particularly conscious of the
significance of
that linguistic shiftwas the Boston-based white abolitionist Edward L. Pierce, who super
vised contrabands at FortressMonroe
in 1861 and later at Port Royal, South Carolina. In
a
Pierce
1863
article,
September
reported, "These people were first called contrabands at
..
FortressMonroe; but at Port Royal.
theywere generally referred to as freedmen. These
terms are milestones in our
he
wrote, "and they are yet to be lost in the better
progress,"
and more
comprehensive
designation
of citizens,
or, when
discrimination
citizens ofAfrican descent."55
is convenient,
53
John E. Bruce, "Washington's Colored Society" [1877], pp. 6, 8 (Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y.).
54
See, for example, Emma Jones Lapsansky, "Friends, Wives,
and Strivings: Networks and Community Values
among Nineteenth-Century
Philadelphia Afroamerican Elites," Pennsylvania Magazine
ofHistory and Biography,
108 (Jan. 1984), 3-24; and Elsa
Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African Ameri
can Political Life in theTransition from
to Freedom," Public Culture, 7 (Winter 1994), 107-46.
Slavery
55
Pierce, "Freedmen at Port Royal," 292. See also Second Annual Report of theWestern Freedmen's Aid Commis
an
sion, 6; H. Clay Trumbull, War Memories
(New York, 1898), 402; and Levi Coffin, Reminis
Army Chaplain
of
cences
ofLevi Coffin, theReputed President of theUnderground Railroad (\%7 6; New York, 1968), 620. Emancipation
and the potential citizenship of former slaves
challenged existing vocabularies of race and servitude elsewhere. See
and Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, "El color inexistente.
Dubois,
150-51, 252-57;
Colony of Citizens, 143-44,
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The Journal ofAmerican History
1082
March 2007
"Freedmen" took hold, leaving unfulfilled Pierces prediction of a term that did not
race or
imply
distinguish between the recently emancipated and those who had always
been free. The War Department
ratified the term inMarch
1863, when it commissioned
theAmerican Freedmen's Inquiry Commission. Congress later placed its imprimatur on
the term in founding the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands (popu
as the Freedmen's Bureau) in spring 1865. The term
larly known
"refugees" in the bu
to
name
in
Unionists
whose
Unionist sympa
the South
reau's
referred
displaced white
came
into existence. The U.S.
thiesmade them essentially statelesswhen the Confederacy
government offered such people limited support, through themilitary during thewar and
never
new bureau afterward.
on as a word for displaced
"Refugee"
caught
through the
(and implicitly Unionist) African Americans, notwithstanding the Christian Recorder cor
use in place of "contraband." Indeed, the use of "freedmen"
respondent's call for the term's
and "refugee" side by side in the name of the new federal bureau reflected a segregated
world view inwhich white people were linked to their prior status as citizens, black peo
to their
ple
prior
as slaves,
status
a
people
a
without
country
to
lose.56
the persistence of segregating language, the government took steps between
Despite
1865 and 1869 to secure citizenship forAfrican Americans via new constitutional amend
ments that abolished slavery, defined everyone born in theUnited States as a citizen, and
prohibited racial discrimination in voting rights. In practice, the amendments did little
to guarantee the rights ofAfrican Americans, but formally they settled the question of the
place of former slaves in the national body politic. As the pseudonymous humorist Pe
troleum G. Nasby wrote to his pseudonymous friendMark Twain in 1869, "The Reliable
is contraband no more, but a citizen of theUnited States."57
Contraband
terms such as "contraband" and "freedman" receded into history, the
"citizen"
would be modified by adjectives such as "colored" or sup
of
egalitarianism
so in
nouns such as
"negro." Yet theword "contraband" had become
planted entirely by
toNortherners' experiences of the Civil War that contrabands appeared frequently
tegral
in thememoirs, reminiscences, histories, and fictions of the Civil War published toward
the end of the nineteenth century. Reflecting the reactionary tenor of the times, inwhite
the vi
wartime use of "contraband"?especially
people's writing the complexities of the
As time-bound
sions
time
as
of contrabands
izens?fell
art
away
and
invaluable
in favor
writing.58
assets
to the Union,
of the minstrel-style,
Contraband
characters
comic
of
empathy,
objects
also
characterizations
in late
nineteenth-century
or nascent
found
writing
cit
in war
about
raciales y trabajo rural en Rio de Janeiro tras la abolici?n de la esclavitud" (The nonexistent color: Race
Relaciones
relations and ruralwork inRio de Janeiro after the abolition of slavery),Historia Social (Valencia, Spain), 22 (1995),
83-100.
56
in the Occupied
On federal aid to Unionists of the South, see Stephen V Ash, "Poor Whites
South, 1861?
1865," Journal ojSouthern History, 57 (Feb. 1991), 39?62. On how the bureau came to serve white refugees as well
Ac
as freedmen, see Herman Belz, "The Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1865 and the Principle of No Discrimination
to Color," Civil War History, 21 (Fall 1975), 197-217. The term "refugee" had come intowidespread use in
cording
exiles from France. Until well into the twentieth century,
late seventeenth-century England to designate Huguenot
itwas used interchangeably with others such as "exile" and "emigr?" to describe people who had been ejected or dis
and Displacements ofStatecraft
as a result of state
policies. Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees
placed, usually
1999), 58-61, 81-83.
(Minneapolis,
57
Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain (4 vols., New York, 1912), I, 386.
58
S. L. Gracey, "The
50 (Dec. 1882), 738-41;
See Rosella Rice, "Mother Bickerdyke," Arthur's Home Magazine,
T.
of Recreation, 7 (Feb. 1886), 546; John
Outing, an Illustrated Monthly Magazine
Flight of the Contrabands,"
"Little Jethro,"
Sara D. Halsted,
9
the
Overland
of
Civil
"An
539-41;
War,"
1887),
(May
Monthly,
Episode
Doyle,
ibid, 5 (May 1885), 484-87;
John Habberton,
"My Friend Moses," Scribner'sMonthly, 13 (Jan. 1877), 399-404;
and Charles
14
an'
E.
C.
"Moses
Aaron," ibid.,
(Aug. 1877), 542-46; King, "Contraband Christmas";
Mary
Wyeth,
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The Word
the Civil War
bands
as
"Contraband" and theMeanings
often provided
passive,
impoverished,
a humorous
picturesque,
of Emancipation
writers represented contra
element. White
often
1083
and?where
dishonest,
relevant?un
intoNorthern life. Such writers used "contraband" for escaping slaves in the
Civil War period but not typically for African Americans
in the present. One excep
tion was the invocation of "intelligent contraband" and "reliable contraband" to refer to
present-day sources of suspect information. A racialized symbol of haplessness and dis
honesty, the "intelligent contraband" became part of the scaffolding of an increasingly
assimilable
racist
society.59
Military officials and civilian reliefworkers who wrote memoirs of theirwartime expe
riences often recounted the origin of the new meaning of "contraband" at FortressMon
roe, and they frequently alluded to the term's popularity during thewar. Protective of his
legacy, Benjamin Butler took space in his 1892 autobiography to refute a charge that he
had not invented themoniker, publishing a letter from a former Confederate officerwho
said he had heard Butler declare the fugitives at Fortress Monroe
"contraband of war."60
encounter
a
historians
have
Butler's
with
the
three
Subsequent
given
fugitives place in
on
events
attention
at
on
their
the
Fortress
wartime
Monroe;
history, training
unfolding
on
about
and
the
and
of
Union
property rights;
questions
slavery
trajectory
policy from
to
are
it.
not
While
those
account
do
upholding slavery
worthy subjects, they
destroying
for the vast and enthusiastic popular appropriation of the term "contraband," a
phenom
enon
contemporaries acknowledged but rarely analyzed.
Circulation of the term "contraband" exposed the constraints on Northerners' visions
for former slaves. The brutal racism exemplified by
Vanity Fairs illustration of "The High
at
one
Contraband"
stood
end
of
the
ly Intelligent
spectrum of possibilities, but the other
end was not necessarily defined by acceptance of the recently
as full citi
emancipated
zens. Indeed, itwas almost
to
term
divorce the
from its connotations of dif
impossible
ference and inferiority.Even white egalitarians, such as Thomas Waterman Wood, who
envisioned dignity and citizenship for former slaves also tended to see them as
helpless or
And
at
African
Americans
who
had
been
free
the
war's
incomplete.
although
beginning,
such as Henry Gooding, expressed no doubts about the fundamental
humanity of former
slaves, their invocation of "contraband" usually marked the differences they perceived?
economic,
The
modified
cultural,
or
themselves
religious?between
inability of most Northern whites
by
race
or
previous
condition,
had
and
the
newly
emancipated.
to imagine former slaves as full citizens, un
tragic
consequences.
But
the racist
repression
with which the Civil War period ended should not erase the richNorthern debate about
themeanings of slave emancipation. As enslaved
people pressed for their own freedom
as contrabands. In
the
Northerners
them
South,
throughout
imagined
drawing them,
"A Little Contraband,"
in The St. Nicholas
Mcllvaine,
(1947; New York,
Anthology, ed. Henry Steele Commager
1983), 153-60. Rare exceptions include Pinkerton, Spy of the Rebellion, 194, 245, 343-93;
and Edwin Forbes,
Years After: An Artist's Story
Thirty
of theGreat War (20 vols., New York, 1890-1891), XV, 233.
59
"The Hidden River," Harper's Weekly, Nov. 2, 1889, p. 881;
George W. Hosmer,
"Promoting Immigration,"
New York Times, Oct. 24, 1879; untitled, ibid, Feb. 13, 1885; Editorial, ibid.,
July 22, 1885; "A Reminder," Wash
Nov.
19, 1899; Editorial, ibid., Feb. 25, 1878; "Current Comment,"
ingtonPost,
ibid., Aug. 19, 1882; and Thomas
W Higginson,
"The Next Step in Journalism," Current Literature, 8 (Dec. 1891), 486.
60
See Butler,
For nonfiction that
to secure the Civil
Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences, 256?64.
sought
War meaning of "contraband" for the future, see
Forbes, Thirty
Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, IV, 387-89;
Years After, 233; Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., The Romance
of theCivil War (New York, 1903); John Eaton, Grant, Lin
coln, and theFreedmen: Reminiscences of theCivil War (New York, 1907), esp. 1-14, 46-61; Elizabeth Nicholson,
"A
Contraband Camp," Indiana History Bulletin, 1
an
(Sept. 1924), 134?40; Trumbull, War Memories
of Army Chap
andWilliams, History of theNegro
lain, 374, 386, 394-89;
Troops in theWar of theRebellion, 70-72.
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1084
The Journal ofAmerican History
March 2007
to fill
joking and singing about them, and telling stories about them,Northerners sought
a
term
thatwas, by definition, transitional and unstable. The word's mul
with meaning
valences
and
novelty provided creative latitude forwordsmiths and illustratorswho
tiple
used it to explore the implications of social upheaval, military conflict, the demise of slav
ery, and supposed racial difference. In thewartime context, imagined contrabands could
be menacing migrants, the butt of jokes, citizen-soldiers in themaking, ideal free laborers,
or avatars of racial
uplift. The individual contraband could be
objects of pity and reform,
a vessel for
on
while
black
manhood,
groups of contrabands could represent
speculation
or the nature of race. For Northern African
of
about
the
enslavement
impact
questions
Americans the term helped name distinctions of status at a moment when emancipation
a
to those who had long been held in bondage.
required
rethinking of their relationship
one
no
knew
who would win thewar or whether itwould
forward
from
1861,
Looking
an end to slavery. In that period of deep uncertainty, Northerners used the term
bring
"contraband" to face questions common to all societies experiencing abolition during the
long nineteenth century, questions about the meanings of race, former slaves' willing
ness towork forwages, the relationship between formerly free blacks and those who had
been enslaved, and the terms under which freedpeople would become part of the body
on the usage of "contraband" reg
politic. Contemporaries who self-consciously reflected
istered their understanding that naming the people then emerging from bondage was a
critical step in cementing their future. Those critics rightly recognized the importance
of language in creating a foundation for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the nation. The
in popular culture did not constitute a rethinking of scien
proliferation of contrabands
tific ideas about race but a debate over the boundaries of the body politic, themeanings
of citizenship and dependency, and the legacies of slavery. For their own part, freedpeople
drew on a rich palate of experience and ideology tomake sense of their own lives. Yet the
about a nation in
imagined contrabands of art, literature, and propaganda reveal much
the midst
of a revolutionary
transformation.
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