On this Bare Ground: The Ordeal of Freedpeople’s Camps and the Making of Emancipation in the Civil War West

Abstract

This dissertation is a social history of the struggle for self-determination and freedom, which reinterprets emancipation with the West as its starting point. It investigates the reasonings, the way-making calculations, and the collisions between strategy and coercion behind the actions of enslaved people in the Western and Trans-Mississippi Theaters of the war, who—not unlike their counterparts in the Eastern Theater—confronted and battled against a label popularized by Union General Benjamin F. Butler: “contraband of war.” However—by taking western “contraband camps” as stages of confrontation and battlefields in their own right—this dissertation analyzes the particularities and peculiarities of slavery’s early but extended unraveling in the “plantation heartland” and the “border states” of the Mississippi River Valley. It argues that westward freedpeople experienced an acute, volatile, rapid, and punishing battle against slavery in the shadows of cotton and other staples, near cities and across the countryside. Within and beyond “contraband camps,” enslaved people confronted slaveholders who did not accept what the historian Eugene D. Genovese called “the moment of truth,” and they struggled against the surveillance and interference of guerillas, missionaries, Union officials, and state and local governments with characters, politics, and backgrounds that diverged from their eastern counterparts. The project analyzes dimensions of the lives that the freedpeople fought to construct by attempting to control the war effort, reconstituting their families, and asserting autonomy through educational, political, labor, and cultural practices, while facing re-enslavement schemes that were as outlandish and outsized as they were intricate. It shows the common description—“going to Union lines”—to be an abstraction or a shorthand containing several successive “goings” and fights: against slaveholders, against the “employers” that many of them became, and against expectations that the freedpeople must accept lives of ceaselessly working for others.

By looking beyond Fortress Monroe (Virginia) and Port Royal (South Carolina)—the traditional centers of gravity in the histories of “contraband camps” and other wartime assemblies of freedpeople—the dissertation tells a distinct story about the slaves’ war between St. Louis and New Orleans. It challenges persistent frameworks of “rehearsals” for reconstruction or “experiments” of freedom, which often do not capture the severity and finality of the freedpeople’s struggles for autonomy, and which often have the effect of considering the objectives of missionaries and Union officials at the expense of the freedpeople’s objectives. Instead, it imagines the work of alliances between the self-emancipated. While joining recent literature on the importance of freedpeople’s movements, this dissertation, nonetheless, argues that freedpeople also imagined a politics of settlement and stability, in light of the abuses and frustrations of forcible relocations and disappearances. It investigates the punitive aspects of the “contraband” situation, rather than just the humanitarian, for I interpret the infamous “neglect” of freedwomen and freedchildren in camps not as complacency, but as a form of violence, and I argue that the disorder cannot be explained entirely by the shorthand of the mere “chaos of war.” The dissertation also studies the predicaments and battles before freedpeople who lived and fought in and along the Upper South’s “border,” across the most volatile U.S. guerrilla warfare in this nation’s history, and often beyond the jurisdiction of the better-known “contraband” superintendents and “humanitarian” sponsorships. In these border regions, especially, I examine the freedpeople’s interactions with the white refugees who crossed their paths and benefited from double-standards and the succor that freedpeople did not receive. Overall, the dissertation is concerned with what the beginnings and ends of the westward “camps” reveal about American slavery and its demise, the next worlds that the former slaves made, the impacts of the ordeal on freedpeople of differing circumstances and backgrounds, and the ways in which the legacies of the “camps” ought to matter for silences around exterminationism and broader narratives about freedom, progress, capitalism, and racism in American history.