A Century of Negro Migration

by Carter Godwin Woodson

[Footnote 42: Minutes and Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the People of Color.]

CHAPTER VI

CONFUSING MOVEMENTS

The Civil War waged largely in the South started the most exciting movement of the Negroes hitherto known. The invading Union forces drove the masters before them, leaving the slaves and sometimes poor whites to escape where they would or to remain in helpless condition to constitute a problem for the northern army.[1] Many poor whites of the border States went with the Confederacy, not always because they wanted to enter the war, but to choose what they considered the lesser of two evils. The slaves soon realized a community of interests with the Union forces sent, as they thought, to deliver them from thralldom. At first, it was difficult to determine a fixed policy for dealing with these fugitives. To drive them away was an easy matter, but this did not solve the problem. General Butler's action at Fortress Monroe in 1861, however, anticipated the policy finally adopted by the Union forces.[2] Hearing that three fugitive slaves who were received into his lines were to have been employed in building fortifications for the Confederate army, he declared them seized as contraband of war rather than declare them actually free as did General Fremont[3] and General Hunter.[4] He then gave them employment for wages and rations and appropriated to the support of the unemployed a portion of the earnings of the laborers. This policy was followed by General Wood, Butler's successor, and by General Banks in New Orleans.

An elaborate plan for handling such fugitives was carried out by E.S. Pierce and General Rufus Saxton at Port Royal, South Carolina. Seeing the situation in another light, however, General Halleck in charge in the West excluded slaves from the Union lines, at first, as did General Dix in Virginia. But Halleck, in his instructions to General McCullum, February, 1862, ordered him to put contrabands to work to pay for food and clothing.[5] Other commanders, like General McCook and General Johnson, permitted the slave hunters to enter their lines and take their slaves upon identification,[6] ignoring the confiscation act of August, 1861, which was construed by some as justifying the retention of such refugees. Officers of a different attitude, however, soon began to protest against the returning of fugitive slaves. General Grant, also, while admitting the binding force of General Halleck's order, refused to grant permits to those in search of fugitives seeking asylum within his lines and at the capture of Fort Donelson ordered the retention of all blacks who had been used by the Confederates in building fortifications.[7]

Lincoln finally urged the necessity for withholding fugitive slaves from the enemy, believing that there could be in it no danger of servile insurrection and that the Confederacy would thereby be weakened.[8] As this opinion soon developed into a conviction that official action was necessary, Congress, by Act of March 13, 1862, provided that slaves be protected against the claims of their pursuers. Continuing further in this direction, the Federal Government gradually reached the position of withdrawing Negro labor from the Confederate territory. Finally the United States Government adopted the policy of withholding from the Confederates, slaves received with the understanding that their masters were in rebellion against the United States. With this as a settled policy then, the United States Government had to work out some scheme for the remaking of these fugitives coming into its camps.

In some of these cases the fugitives found themselves among men more hostile to them than their masters were, for many of the Union soldiers of the border States were slaveholders themselves and northern soldiers did not understand that they were fighting to free Negroes. The condition in which they were on arriving, moreover, was a new problem for the army. Some came naked, some in decrepitude, some afflicted with disease, and some wounded in their efforts to escape.[9] There were "women in travail, the helplessness of childhood and of old age, the horrors of sickness and of frequent deaths."[10] In their crude state few of them had any conception of the significance of liberty, thinking that it meant idleness and freedom from restraint. In consequence of this ignorance there developed such undesirable habits as deceit, theft and licentiousness to aggravate the afflictions of nakedness, famine and disease.[11]

In the East large numbers of these refugees were concentrated at
Washington, Alexandria, Fortress Monroe, Hampton, Craney Island and Fort
Norfolk. There were smaller groups of them at Yorktown, Suffolk and
Portsmouth.[12]

[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE PER CENT OF NEGROES IN TOTAL POPULATION, BY
STATES: 1910.

(Map 2, Bulletin 129, The United States Bureau of the Census.)]