https://archive.org/details/lincolnhisadmira00symo/page/159/mode/2up?q=contraband+

John B. Marchand ventured up the Stono River, ten miles south of Charleston. After steaming upriver for half a dozen miles in the Unadilla (the first of the ninety-day gunboats that Welles had author- ized the year before), Marchand was returning toward the open sea when the sound of screams from the riverbank drew the attention of every man on board. Marchand saw "a stampede of slaves on the cotton and corn fields to the south of the river." They were running flat out as if in fear for their lives. "One Negro woman we saw hurrying down to the water's edge with eight little children," Marchand wrote in his jour- nal, "one of them sucking her breast, another she had on her shoulder, two others were holding only her scanty dress, and the other four little ones, at top of speed and almost naked, flocked around and materially impeded her progress." Behind them was a small body of Confederate cavalry "charging at full speed among the flying slaves." Marchand watched in horror as "the cavalry fired their pistols on all sides amongst the Negroes." At once he ordered his gunboats to open fire. With the explosion of the first shell, the rebel horsemen "went scampering in every direction," a sight which Marchand found extremely gratifying. While the cavalry fled, the group of slaves, mostly women and children, some seventy or eighty in number, all crowded down to the bank of the river. Obviously, Marchand could not leave them there, so he dropped anchor and sent boats to bring them on board.

From them, Marchand learned that the appearance of his gunboats in the river the day before had convinced the local planters to move their slaves to the interior. The master had promised them they could stay in their homes, but when the men had finished their work, the cavalry had suddenly appeared and driven them off the island and onto the mainland. Aware of this, and unwilling to be next, the women and children had left their cabins and hidden in the nearby woods. The cavalrymen found them and chased them to the river. The refugees told Marchand they did not want to go inland to be put back to work on the fields. Clearly, however, they could not stay aboard the warships. To Marchand, the solution was self-evident: "I must colonize them." He landed them at a secure location where they could be protected from rebel cavalry by intervening swamps and by the gunboats, and over the next week several hundred more refugees joined them. Marchand vis- ited his colony regularly, dropping off supplies and checking to see how

the colonists were doing. Sympathetic as he was to their plight, Mar- chand was not free of the race prejudice that was nearly universal in the nineteenth century. When he stopped to look in on them a week later, he noted in his journal, "They were a happy set of darkies enjoying themselves in doing nothing."

Similar colonies sprang up all along the Atlantic coast. At Port Royal, Du Pont established a colony on North Edisto Island, where be- tween seven hundred and nine hundred displaced blacks were settled under the navy's protection in the first week of occupation. A month later there were more than fourteen hundred.6 Though the Fugitive Slave Law was still technically in effect, Benjamin Butler had devised a clever legal construction to circumvent it. The year before when a few escaped slaves had shown up at Fort Monroe, Butler had refused to re- turn them to their master because the rebels had used them to work on military entrenchments, drive wagons, and do other jobs that sup- ported the illegal rebellion. Butler explained that this made them, in ef- fect, "contraband of war," just like captured military equipment. Such a construction allowed Butler to refuse to send them back to their mas- ters without overtly challenging the principle of slave property, and soon the escaped slaves were routinely being called "contrabands."*

At Port Royal, Du Pont established a colony on North Edisto Island, where be- tween seven hundred and nine hundred displaced blacks were settled under the navy's protection in the first week of occupation. A month later there were more than fourteen hundred.6 Though the Fugitive Slave Law was still technically in effect, Benjamin Butler had devised a clever legal construction to circumvent it. The year before when a few escaped slaves had shown up at Fort Monroe, Butler had refused to re- turn them to their master because the rebels had used them to work on military entrenchments, drive wagons, and do other jobs that sup- ported the illegal rebellion. Butler explained that this made them, in ef- fect, "contraband of war," just like captured military equipment. Such a construction allowed Butler to refuse to send them back to their mas- ters without overtly challenging the principle of slave property, and soon the escaped slaves were routinely being called "contrabands."*

As Du Pont's squadron labored with mixed success to make the blockade impermeable, the constantly expanding contraband colonies along the coast exacerbated the problem of supply. At New Bern and Roanoke Island in North Carolina, as well as at Port Royal and all along the barrier islands of South Carolina and Georgia, thousands of former slaves settled into their makeshift camps. Du Pont had his hands full just managing his large force — grown now to thirty-eight warships — without worrying about how to organize, police, supply, and defend the crowded contraband camps. In order to allow the con- trabands to defend themselves from rebel raids, he authorized the issu- ing of some old flintlock muskets to the men in the camps. This was well ahead of anything being considered in Washington. Major General Ormsby Mitchel, who replaced Hunter in command of the Department of the South in September, suggested settling the contra-bands permanently into cooperative plantations on the offshore is- lands.* To protect them, he suggested "the formation of black regi- ments" that could occupy the coastal forts when white regiments moved inland. He argued that "if the black population should prove it- self able to occupy hold and defend, the territory given into its charge by the Government, then shall we then have indeed reached the solu- tion of the great problem; and the question 'what shall be done with the liberated Slaves?' will have been satisfactorily answered."18 Indeed. But would the country accept such an answer?

Hopefully all of these excerpts show the mix of sympathy, paternalistic racism, brigandry, and genuine heroism all on display