BOOK REVIEW: Escaped slaves aid Union Navy

BLUEJACKETS AND CONTRABANDS: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE UNION NAVY

By Barbara Brooks Tomblin

University of Kentucky Press

400 pages. $39.95

REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG

The Union Army did not recognize units of black “contrabands” as duly constituted regiments of United States Colored Troops until May 1863. But Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, a staunch abolitionist, authorized his naval officers to enlist able-bodied runaway male slaves “under the same forms and regulations as apply to other enlistments” as early as September 1861.

This policy formalized the complex, mutually beneficial relationship between the Union Navy and escaped slaves, especially along the Atlantic coast, that lasted throughout the Civil War. “Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy” is the first scholarly examination of that important relationship.

Barbara Brooks Tomblin’s meticulously researched, deftly organized and cogently written study illuminates the critical but often overlooked role played by the U.S. Navy in transforming and redefining the lives of thousands of previously enslaved persons.

“Always short on manpower,” Mrs. Tomblin asserts, “the Union Navy encouraged able-bodied males to enlist.” As crewmen of Navy ships and gunboats, these black sailors were paid $10 per month, the same as an Army private, and “served alongside their white shipmates on blockade duty, on expeditions up rivers and creeks, or in naval landing parties; some of them were injured or killed.”

Contrabands became sailors, river pilots, stevedores, guides, skilled mechanics, spies and deckhands on boat crews. But because almost all of the contraband sailors were former slaves and therefore illiterate, they could not record their journeys to freedom or their wartime experiences. Ms. Tomblin has relied on official Union Army and Navy reports and on letters, diaries and memoirs of naval officers, sailors and others who came in contact with contrabands in the South, including missionaries, teachers and government plantation supervisors.

From these limited sources, she has unearthed a treasure trove of valuable information and insights.

“For many naval officers,” Ms. Tomblin writes, “service on board vessels blockading the South altered their perceptions of the institution of slavery and their attitudes toward abolition.”

An early proponent of using contrabands on naval ships was Flag Officer Samuel F. DuPont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. A sturdy conservative on the question of slavery, DuPont wrote a letter to his wife near the end of 1861 in which he confessed, “My ideas have undergone great changes as to the condition of slaves since I came here and have been on plantations.”

Firsthand observation and interaction with slaves fleeing to the safety of Union ships anchored at the mouth of the region’s rivers and bays convinced many naval officers that they had an obligation to protect contrabands from their former masters and roving guerrilla bands intent on capturing or killing runaway slaves.

But with the Army increasingly engaged in operations against Confederate forces in Virginia, it fell to the Navy to provide security and supervision at many of the contraband camps and villages that sprang up along the South Atlantic coast and on the barrier islands off the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

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