[The following takes place during the American Civil War. Here, the author points out that not all Northern soldiers were fighting for slavery, and they sometimes detested both Southerners and runaway slaves who flocked to Union garrisons, who were often called “contraband”, alike.]
Even self-proclaimed abolitionists harbored profoundly contradictory feelings toward the contrabands they encountered. A Michigan surgeon named Samual Henry Eells professed outrage at the way blacks were neglected in their camps. “Whenever they are gathered in together in any large numbers and kept at government expense,” he wrote, “they are neglected by those whose business it is to take care of them, and die off rapidly in consequence, and everybody seems to feel as if that was about the best way to get rid of them.”
But Eells abhorred tending to the Hardeman County slaves who sought refuge in his camp. “I would as less doctor hogs,” he wrote home, “and would much rather horses.” He made himself a beneficiary of their high rate of mortality. “We intend to keep a dead nigger or two this winter for analytical purposes,” he cheerfully declared. With contrabands at the camp at Bolivar, Tennessee, “dying at the rate of three or four a day,” he hoped to obtain “plenty of subjects in Bolivar from the Negro ‘corral,’ as they call it there, and have got one already.”
Source:
Ward, Andrew. “Contrabands.” River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. Viking, 2005. 50. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Frisby, “’Remember me to everybody.’”
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