HISTORIC REPORT REGARDING RECENTLY FREED PEOPLE IN CIVIL WAR "CONTRABAND" CAMPS

Manuscript document recording the activities of Quaker missionaries in the South during 1863, particularly their observations of contraband camps populated by formerly enslaved people. Assembled from extracts of letters sent to the Friends’ Association of Philadelphia by its agents, the document details the provision of shelter, food, and other aid to refugee slaves. Signed and dated by E. C. Collins, Secretary, 24 December 1864. 12 pages, 6 x 7 1/2 in.

Featured among the contributors is the missionary and minister Elkanah Beard (1833–1905), who, along with his wife Irena, organized a relief effort for refugees in the Mississippi River Valley. Writing from Memphis, Beard reports on the abysmal conditions he observed at the twelve camps in the region that he visited, which housed 26,000 people. While “nearly half of these people are doing tolerably well, all things considered,” the rest “are suffering in various ways: thousands have not a change of raiment and no bed clothing and are compelled to quarter in tents that shield them but very little from the...cold rains and freezing winds of winter. From this exposure, they cannot avoid pneumonia, small pox, and other diseases incident to camp life.”

Another correspondent, Samuel Shipley, echoes Beard’s report, writing from Vicksburg of the sheer number of deaths caused by the lack of appropriate supplies and provisions, which left camp inhabitants ill-equipped in the face of inclement weather and rampant disease. He identifies Colonel John Eaton (1829–1906), “superintendent of the Western and Southwestern camps,” as a champion of the freedmen’s cause: “Happy are these oppressed people that they have found such an advocate & defender. He strongly advises us to send out an agent who understands farming He expressed much satisfaction in the labors of the Friends.” T. Nicholson, writing on 30 December 1863, also comments on Eaton’s effectiveness as a leader in the camps of “Tennessee & in Alabama & interior of Arkansas,” where “more suffering exists.”

Eaton’s background was in education, and he served both as U.S. Commissioner of Education and as a colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War. In 1863, as Ulysses S. Grant’s appointee as Superintendent of Negro Affairs for the Department of Tennessee, Eaton supervised the establishment of 74 schools in the region.

Around the same time, Lucy Chase (1822–1909) writes from Norfolk on the Quaker agents’ efforts to similarly establish schools and distribute aid materials, noting that on the day after their arrival they were given books and sent to the local schoolhouse: “I took with me a quantity of primers and after exciting the ambition of the multitude, I took a slate and wrote copy for them and plunged them deep into letters...some of the very young boys and girls gave be undivided attention and learned rapidly.” The focus of William Burgess’s report is likewise education, and he describes his improvised approach to teaching in the absence of a formal schoolhouse: “I just take my chart, speller & chalk around to their houses -- hear their lessons -- then make chalk letters on the walls about for them to learn by the next day...those who are most anxious to learn follow me around and so recite several times.” Burgess, incidentally, had been drafted as a soldier but was released from service when he offered his services to labor among the contraband refugees as a schoolteacher.

Richly detailed accounts of life in the contraband camps, with stirring descriptions of the interactions between the Quaker agents and the camps’ inhabitants.

[Civil War, Union, Confederate] [African Americana, African American History, Black History, Slavery, Enslavement, Abolition, Emancipation] [Manuscripts, Documents, Letters, Ephemera, Signatures, Autographs]