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9 4 The American Civil War^bathed in the blood of a people once free,
but now enslaved. Oh, let me see him
damned and sunk into the lowest hell.'
Unlike their northern counterparts, most
black and white southerners saw at least some
direct evidence of the war. The appearance of
Union armies created two kinds of refugee.
Thousands of slaves made their way from
southern farms and plantations to northern
lines. In late May 1861, General Benjamin
F. Butler, who commanded a Union enclave at
Fort Monroe at the tip of Virginia's peninsula,
refused to return some fugitive slaves to their
masters. Butler called them 'contraband of
war' and remarked that loss of their labor
would hurt the Confederacy (several of the
men had been constructing southern
fortifications). The term 'contrabands' for
escaped slaves soon caught on.
Over the next two years, as Union
armies campaigned across the Confederacy,
thousands of slaves left southern farms and
plantations. They did so at great risk and, for
the first 15 months of the conflict, with no
guarantee of freedom. Placed in camps and
often assigned to menial jobs with the
army, their presence behind Union lines
helped force the government to define the
status of contrabands. In March 1862,
Congress forbade the return of fugitives to
Confederate owners, and the Second
Confiscation Act of July 1862 declared
slaves of rebel masters free. Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation extended
freedom to all slaves in the Confederacy,
regardless of the owner's loyalty.
Slaves who remained at home also
experienced change. With so many white
men away in the army and old routines
otherwise disrupted by the war, the bonds of
slavery loosened somewhat. There were no
slave uprisings in the Confederacy, but both
white and black southerners understood that
some of the rules no longer applied. Typical
was Fannie Christian of Nelson County,
Virginia, who wrote to the Secretary of War
in June 1862 about her difficulties in
running a farm and supervising slaves (her
husband had been the overseer on this farm,
whose 60-year-old owner was bedridden).
Returning from a brief walk with a neighbor,The inability of many slaveholders to provide their slaves
with sufficient food and clothing helped undermine white
authority. In this woodcut, four Confederate women
accompanied by two slaves make their way to a Union
commissary to request rations. (Author's collection)