BOOK REVIEW: Escaped slaves aid Union Navy

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By Gordon Berg

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.