Contrabands: 1861 view

First-hand and sympathetic

This is the third in a series of Self-Emancipator posts about a term crucial in self-emancipation history: contraband, or contrabands. The three posts can be read out of order. All relate to the welcome news that filmmakers are planning to tell the stories of descendants of the Civil War’s earliest self-emancipators—the earliest contrabands. The filmmakers plan to spotlight that term, a word historically freighted in complex ways. An overview post has appeared, followed by a post reporting on a modern scholar’s extensive investigation of the word as recalled in 2007. The present post reports on the 10,000-word 1861 Atlantic article “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.” Eventually, when more is known: A report on the planning for the film.

By late in the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of enterprising freedom seekers had escaped enslavement across the South. But even half a year into the war, in November 1861, the self-emancipation movement was plenty big enough to compel national notice. That’s when The Atlantic published the remarkable 10,000-word article “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe” (gift link here). The title itself foregrounded a central dimension of emancipation history, the term contrabands.

That word served as a clever linguistic expedient for making ambiguous, and thus for deferring, the issue of slavery escapees’ status. Were the escapees still enslaved? In 1861, politicians had plenty enough problems without seeming to emancipate slavery escapees. So they, and the country generally, adopted this term that vaguely hints at property status—but that also broadly points to much else. 

Some filmmakers are planning to tell the stories of descendants of the very earliest contrabands, from the area around Fort Monroe on Virginia’s Point Comfort, which had also been the 1619 landing place of the first captive Africans. Here’s what someone involved in the film planning sees the term contrabands pointing to:

In the spirit of the “Take Back the Night” marches of the 1970s Women’s Movement, at the Contraband Historical Society we are “Taking Back the Name” and telling the story of a people who did so much to further the fight for freedom. Blacks from enslavement and white slave owners from their bonds with the devil. 

From the start, the word contraband has carried multiple connotations for people to choose from. For a word that, after all, classifies humans as things, some of those connotation were and are undeniably negative. But as the quoted words declare, the term also came to offer a basis for discerning a lively, cheerful, self-confident spirit. The term had “newness and flexibility,” says historian Kate Masur. It “seemed to capture the fugitives’ spontaneous exodus from slavery.”

And that’s mostly what the 1861 Atlantic article author, Edward L. Pierce, saw too. He was a Harvard-trained lawyer who, much later, produced a biography of the abolitionist Charles Sumner.

In 1861 at Fort Monroe on Point Comfort, Pierce saw it all first-hand. He recounts “a three-months’ soldier’s life in Virginia” just after the Civil War began, calling it his “privilege to serve” in a Fort Monroe regiment. He reports that he was assigned “to collect the contrabands, record their names, ages, and the names of their masters, provide their tools, superintend their labor, and procure their rations.”

He saw what he called “the first day in the course of the war in which the negro was employed upon the military works of our army,” marking “a distinct epoch in its progress and in its relations to the colored population.” 

He observed that the refugees, and enslaved Americans generally, saw the moral and political situation clearly: “Such is the mysterious spiritual telegraph which runs through the slave population. Proclaim an edict of emancipation in the hearing of a single slave on the Potomac, and in a few days it will be known by his brethren on the Gulf.” Historians who address the self-emancipation movement often emphasize that mysterious telegraph. 

In his positive, sympathetic spirit about the contrabands, Pierce also wrote in his1861 Atlantic piece:

My comrades smiled, as I undertook the novel duty, enjoying the spectacle of a Massachusetts Republican converted into a Virginia slave-master. To me it seemed rather an opportunity to lead them from the house of bondage never to return. For, whatever may be the general duty to this race, to all such as we have in any way employed to aid our armies our national faith and our personal honor are pledged. The code of a gentleman, to say nothing of a higher law of rectitude, necessitates protection to this extent. Abandoning one of these faithful allies … we should be accursed among the nations of the earth. I felt assured that from that hour, whatsoever the fortunes of the war, every one of those enrolled defenders of the Union had vindicated beyond all future question, for himself, his wife, and their issue, a title to American citizenship, and become heir to all the immunities of Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States. 

He told of addressing the first refugees whom he supervised:

I had argued to judges and juries, but I had never spoken to such auditors before in a court-room. I told them that the colored men had been employed on the breastworks of the Rebels, and we needed their aid,—that they would be required to do only such labor as we ourselves had done,—that they should be treated kindly, and no one should be obliged to work beyond his capacity, or if unwell … . I told them that their masters had said they were an indolent people,—that I did not believe the charge,—that I was going home to Massachusetts soon and should he glad to report that they were as industrious as the whites.

The author disapproved of the negative view of these refugees held by some junior Army officers:

One or two of these, when rests were allowed the negroes, were somewhat disgusted, saying that negroes could dig all the time as well as not. I had had some years before an experience with the use of the shovel under a warm sun, and knew better, and I wished I could superintend a corps of lieutenants and apply their own theory to themselves.

Pierce emphasized “one striking feature in the contrabands which must not be omitted. I did not hear a profane or vulgar word spoken by them during my superintendence.” He marveled that the contrabands, “so dogmatically pronounced unfit for freedom, were in this respect models for those who make high boasts of civility of manners and Christian culture.” 

Pierce reported that among the contrabands, there was a “universal desire” for freedom—calling to mind what I wrote in the post about the Chinese dissident leader Liu Xiaobo. He declared in his Nobel Prize speech that “no force ... can put an end to the human quest for freedom.”

Pierce reported:

There was another word that I could not leave without speaking. Never before in our history had a Northern man, believing in the divine right of all men to their liberty, had an opportunity to address an audience of sixty-four slaves and say what the Spirit moved him to utter,—and I should have been false to all that is true and sacred, if I had let it pass. I said to them that there was one more word for me to add, and that was, that every one of them was as much entitled to his freedom as I was to mine, and I hoped they would all now secure it. … I may forget the playfellows of my childhood, my college classmates, my professional associates, my comrades in arms, but I will remember you and your benedictions until I cease to breathe! Farewell, honest hearts, longing to he free! and may the kind Providence which forgets not the sparrow shelter and protect you!

All of that, and much more in the immensity of 10,000 words, appeared in The Atlantic before the end of 1861, long before emancipation. Yes, as discussed in the earlier posts, there was and is much that’s negative in the Civil War term contraband. But those Americans, those freedom strivers, those self-actualizing self-emancipators, were among history’s most American of all Americans. No wonder their descendants—and the filmmakers—want to see them duly recognized.