"Contrabands"?

Obsolete term?

Newcomers to this free-subscription, national-memory-advocating Substack might want to read the half-page introductory post from Juneteenth 2023, “Why ‘The Self-Emancipator?’”

Welcome news: some filmmakers are planning to tell the stories of descendants of the Civil War’s earliest self-emancipators, the enterprising slavery escapees often, then and now, called “contrabands.”

That term was originally a clever linguistic expedient, foregrounding the ambiguity of escapees’ status. It deferred a question that rose in political volatility as refugee escapees’ numbers rose to hundreds of thousands, directly influencing emancipation politics. Were they still enslaved?

And how will the filmmakers handle the term contrabands now?

Despite any jaunty spirit of defiance the term may have connoted, it objectified—and still objectifies—people as property. That’s the same objection that regularly causes avoidance of retrospectively calling enslaved Americans slaves. Sally Hemings wasn’t just a “slave” of Thomas Jefferson. She was an American with the dignity of her own identity.

I see an analog to contrabands. They too were humans, each with the dignity of her or his own identity, whatever the filthy slavery legalities that had methodically trapped them. In acting with initiative and agency to seek freedom in the new circumstances of civil war, those refugees were some of the most American of Americans.

That the term contrabands isn’t headed for banishment like the n-slur—and that a banishment campaign would be partly counterproductive—doesn’t mean contrabands can’t be recognized as a slur itself.

A future Self-Emancipator post will report on the important prospect of the envisioned film. Preliminary information says it will portray and involve escapees’ descendants around Point Comfort, Virginia—where British North American slavery began in 1619.

By the nineteenth century, that Chesapeake Bay sand spit contained the U.S. Army’s Fort Monroe, with its moated stone citadel. When the Civil War began in 1861, Fort Monroe became the Union’s mighty—and mighty symbolic—bastion in Confederate Virginia.

Those descendants’ ancestors called it Freedom’s Fortress. Thanks to the earliest refugee self-emancipators and a shrewd Yankee general—who first applied the term contraband to slavery escapees withheld from their “owners”—U.S. slavery began to crumble in 1861 at Point Comfort, the original site of American slavery’s own ancestry.

But before any Self-Emancipator post about the prospective film, two contextual posts will appear here. Both will address the term contraband itself as a complex, centrally important—and in my view, troublesome—dimension of this public history.

The first of the two preliminary posts will report on the historian Kate Masur’s 2007 analysis, “‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States.”¹

Professor Masur’s general outlook on what some historians call self-emancipation showed vividly in her 2012 New York Times op-ed (gift link here) “In Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters.” She found it “disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them.” That, she wrote, was even though for “some 30 years, historians have been demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation.” The movie, she emphasized, “reinforces, even if inadvertently, the outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history.”

Her extensive article on the word contraband declares that “widespread adoption of the term, the debates over it, and its limitations together illuminate the critical Civil War–era debate about the future of African Americans and of democracy in the United States.”

That future, now here, is those filmmakers’ intended realm. It appears to me that they’ll be demonstrating the past’s persistent presence.

The second post in the slated preliminary pair will look directly at those earliest Civil War refugees at Fort Monroe. It will excerpt a long, remarkable 1861 article (gift link here) about them from The Atlantic—a publication already prominent then at four years old, and now 167. The 10,000-word article’s headline: “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

In 1861, politicians had plenty enough problems without seeming to emancipate, or to advocate emancipating, slavery escapees. They and the country generally adopted this term “contrabands” that denotes property status—even though, to apply a popular phrase from fall 2024, those self-emancipators were not going back.

A passage from the 1861 Atlantic article shows the political usefulness of the linguistic expedient. It observes that there “is often great virtue in such technical phrases in shaping public opinion.” To make the point, the author imagined the example of a “venerable gentleman, who wears gold spectacles and reads a conservative daily” and who

prefers confiscation to emancipation. He is reluctant to have slaves declared freemen, but has no objection to their being declared contrabands. His whole nature rises in insurrection [when hearing] that a thing ought to be done because it is a duty, but he yields gracefully when [it is] done because it is a military necessity.

Consider two examples of other terms that, like contrabands, embed themselves in the culture but mislead. The first is from outside American slavery history.

I once worked as an editor and research scholar for NASA’s academic history program. Later, for Physics Today Online, I wrote hundreds of columns about media reporting and commentary on science generally. Still later, I published in the magazine Physics Today a letter insisting that it doesn’t take a rocket engineer to recognize the misleading cliché rocket scientist.

It’s mostly engineers who mastermind and shepherd rocket-powered spaceflight for scientists. Correction of the misleading but cemented rocket scientist cliché isn’t coming. But that doesn’t mean the error can’t be acknowledged.

Within national memory of slavery, what about the misleading term plantation? I’ve seen articles about tourists objecting—sometimes forcefully—when tour guides at former antebellum American “plantations” give them slavery facts instead of moonbeamy dreams of gracious, elegant living. And it’s easy to find residential neighborhoods named this-or-that “plantation” to connote refined pleasantness.

But whatever is to be said about antebellum American plantations’ genteel magnolia dimensions, those torture-enforced slave-labor farms were torture-enforced slave-labor farms. They were sites of crimes against humanity—yet now sometimes sites for weddings.

I see no prospect for correction of the misleading general use of plantation in national memory of slavery. But I see plenty of potential for acknowledgment of the realities of antebellum southern “plantations.”

That 1861 Atlantic article predicted that “the term ‘contraband’ bore a new signification, with which it will pass into history.”

Yes, it did. And contrabands won’t be replaced soon by refugees or anything else, though I think the closely related self-emancipators will eventually prosper. But that doesn’t make contrabands wholly unlike the n-slur.

How will those filmmakers handle the term? How should the rest of us treat it?

1. Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 4, March 2007, 1050–1084.