Most Americans have never heard of Civil War contraband camps, and a lack of knowledge concerning the role the camps played in shaping the African American transition to freedom is unfortunate as it oversimplifies our understanding of emancipation--especially the active role blacks played in gaining their own freedom. Literally hundreds of thousands of the four million African Americans still enslaved in 1860 came into contact with Union lines. While many blacks remained on farms and plantations  in areas occupied by federal forces, many other blacks either took flight, searching for Union lines, or departed from their former homes as the Union moved out. Camps for fugitives ranged from makeshift cover just outside military encampments to abandoned barracks to small "neighborhoods" envisioned by superintendents, army officers placed in charge of fugitives, and built by the fugitives themselves.Camps did not exist in every Southern state but rather in areas where the Union had gained a foothold. Such areas mostly included towns and cities, but, in fact, some fugitives found refuge aboard Navy vessels. In all cases, especially after 1862, the freedom-seekers were put to work in various capacities, making the camps the first places of employment for former slaves.  

For most African American bondsmen and women, the Civil War years were the best and worst of times. It is true, as Jim Downs, author of Sick from Freedom, reminds us that whole families perished together and apart, literally thousands of blacks trying desperately to transition from slavery. Yet, the war also opened a new space for freedom, and, as complicated as the many stories of freedpeople are, thousands also either by their own ingenuity or by the assistance of the federal military found employments and created homes for themselves. That their descendants are alive today gives evidence of their survival. Of the importance of remembering the death toll and the reason for it there can be no doubt, but stories of fortitude and success must be told as well.

In the banner exhibited on this site, freedwoman Patsy Moore, former slave of Dabney Hull of DeSoto and Marshall counties in Mississippi, tells of how her family migrated to Memphis during the war. Her story is not unique. Escaping blacks moved to contraband camps by several modes of transportation, on foot, by wagon, by mule, and, in the best cases, by train. Moore's memory of her father sending for the family by wagon suggests a resourcefulness and a mobility that have hardly been acknowledged in reference to blacks during the war. Records reveal that literally thousands of blacks were on the move between 1861 and 1865. And this phenomenal shift of the enslaved population during the war created a liminal, temporary, space in which thousands perished while thousands more discovered and helped to create opportunity.


“To sum up the conditions of the Negro as represented by my officers, it should be said that of all the elements represented in the Valley, the independent Negro cultivator was without doubt the most successful.” 


                                                                                                                                         John Eaton, Jr., Superintendent of Freedmen
                                                                                                      Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen

The Register of Freedmen is an 1864 document containing the names of over three thousand former bondsmen, women, and children. To date, this is the largest published record of former African American slaves living in a camp. The freedpeople appearing in this record come from eleven different states, a fact that suggests that this particular camp, Camp Shiloh, was a second-stage camp. Most, if not all, of the freedpeople in this record had likely lived at other camps prior to coming to Shiloh. For many reasons including that over 600 slave owners are named (and their residences) the implications of the information contained in this document are far reaching. Current research on this record includes estimating the number of living descendants of persons appearing in the document. Other similar documents exist as they were ordered by the Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, an ad hoc agency set up to research the conditions of blacks in the South during the war. Some of those documents are available on this site.