12/19/2023 0 Comments Whats contrabandEven as Little Rock (Pulaski County) came under control of Union forces in September 1863, it was not until June 1865 that Confederate holdouts based in Hempstead County officially surrendered to the Union army. However, the spread of Union control took time. With continued Union occupation throughout Arkansas, philanthropists from the North increased their efforts to aid the former slaves. Contrabands also endured theft and violence at the hands of whites. The Union army tried to ameliorate these conditions by setting up a system that included a hospital, with at least one surgeon to administer to the former slaves. Most contraband camps suffered from poor sanitation. However, freed blacks were frequently not adequately compensated for the work they did under white supervision. Women cooked, cleaned, and washed and mended clothes for officers and enlisted men. Contrabands worked as stable hands, teamsters, personal servants, and cooks. Men worked as laborers, building Fort Curtis and the earthworks near Helena. The former slaves took advantage of whatever opportunities given them to survive, whether by growing vegetable gardens or finding jobs with the army. Northern charitable organizations-including the American Missionary Association, the Western Sanitary Commission, the North Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission, and the Indiana Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends ( Quakers)-sent food, medicine, doctors, nurses, and teachers to the various freedmen camps in Arkansas. Most of these camps contained fewer than 2,000 former slaves at any given time, but with military aid they also formed the basis of Union recruitment of many more black soldiers. Other informal camps or refugee centers existed after 1863 in Desha County, DeValls Bluff (Prairie County), Lick Skillet (Monroe County), and Magnolia (Columbia County). For example, Home Farm, near Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), attracted many refugees and freedmen after the Emancipation Proclamation. By 1864, four camps housed most of Helena’s former slaves-Helena, Island 63 (in the Mississippi River), Freedmen’s Fort, and Fort Pinney.īy late 1863, Union forces also occupied other parts of Arkansas, and contraband camps soon emerged around the state. Other contrabands earned wages working for the army, for civilians in Helena, and on plantations outside of town. Former slaves supplied crucial manpower so that Union forces engaged against Confederates elsewhere would not be needed to fight in Arkansas. Ultimately, more than 5,500 black volunteers from Arkansas served in the Union military. Nonetheless, the contraband settlements around Helena formed the basis for Union recruiting efforts aimed at thousands of able-bodied freedmen, and the first of six black Arkansas volunteer regiments was organized at Helena beginning in April 1863. However, shortly after Coffin’s visit, these camps were attacked by the Confederates, and many blacks perished in the burning cabins in which they were housed. Coffin referred to other camps between Helena and Vicksburg, Mississippi, among them Camp Deliverance, Camp Wood, and Camp Colony. Many blacks were living in three large churches, while others found shelter in houses and in tents. Coffin wrote that he found 3,600 contrabands in Helena working either in the service of the government or as farmers. In May 1863, a Quaker man named Levi Coffin visited Helena, where he met with an old neighbor, William Shugart. From 1863 onward, the number of contraband camps and other refugee centers for former slaves in Arkansas increased. With this act, the Civil War evolved from a fight to preserve the Union to a fight for freedom. President Abraham Lincoln’s initial Emancipation Proclamation, announced in September 1862, warned Confederates still in rebellion that their slaves would be freed by the U.S. Colonel John Eaton was placed in charge of various contraband camps throughout eastern Arkansas. Helena would be occupied by Federal forces through the war’s end, and the area became the most important refugee center in Arkansas for escaped slaves. Word spread among Arkansas’s slaves, and when Curtis’s army arrived at Helena (Phillips County) in the summer of 1862, more than 2,000 came with him hoping for freedom and protection. Issuing certificates of freedom to hundreds of “contraband” fugitives (meaning escaped or Union-freed slaves), Curtis laid the foundation for emancipation in Arkansas, and he was one of the more determined Union military leaders in the belief that slaves should be freed. Curtis drew on the authority of earlier “confiscation” acts to free black slaves for use in the Union army. In 1862, as a response to Confederate use of slave labor against the Federal army in Arkansas, Union general Samuel R.
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