General Grant and the Creation of Contraband Camps During the Vicksburg Campaign

Chaplain John Eaton of the 27th Ohio Regiment

Frontispiece of "Grant, Lincoln and the Freedman: Reminiscences of the Civil War," by John Eaton, 1907

As General Ulysses S. Grant’s armies moved south towards the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1862 and 1863, increasing numbers of enslaved people traveled to Grant’s military camps for protection, sanctuary, and ultimately their own freedom. Many of these “refugees,” oftentimes referred to as “contrabands” by U.S. military personnel, came to the camps facing dire circumstances. General Grant needed to find a solution to provide for their well-being while at the same time dealing with the stress of managing his army and prosecuting the Union war effort.

Very early in the war, it became evident that enslaved African Americans saw the American Civil War as a golden opportunity to strike for freedom. When enslaved people sought refuge with the U.S. military, it forced the Lincoln administration to consider whether the military should aid these flights to freedom. When the government’s guidelines were unclear or not forthcoming, generals like Grant had to come up with their own solutions. Sometimes enslaved refugees entered Union lines only to have hostile commanders return them to their enslavers. In November 1861, General Henry Halleck sided with these commanders when he issued General Orders No. 3, which banned enslaved runaways from staying within military lines. Grant tried to follow the rules outlined by his superiors. In a letter written to a subordinate officer in Kentucky, Grant remarked that “I do not want the Army used as Negro catchers, but still less do I want to see it used as a cloak to cover their escape. No matter what our private views may be on this subject there are in this Department positive orders on this subject, and these orders must be obeyed.” The ruthless nature of the conflict challenged this conviction, however. Grant later recalled in his Personal Memoirs that after the battle of Shiloh in April 1862, “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.” In his mind, that “conquest” included a fight to end slavery.

On July 17, 1862 Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act. In contrast to General Orders No. 3, this act, as Grant later recalled, “prohibited the expulsion of the Negroes from the protection of the army.” In the early days of the Vicksburg Campaign, Grant remembered thousands of African American men, women, and children escaping slavery to the protection of his army at Grand Junction, Tennessee. This wave of arrivals made it “impossible to advance” with his army, forcing Grant’s hand in dealing with human and logistical challenges. While the Union army utilized and fed able-bodied young men as teamsters, cooks, and pioneers, Grant realized that his supplies could only take care of a small percentage of the refugees. What was he to do with the remaining people not employed with the army but who needed food, shelter and other life necessities? According to historian Brooks Simpson, Grant decided to create “encampments for black families. Blacks would earn wages and work toward providing for themselves by harvesting cotton and corn from the surrounding abandoned plantations.” Grant wrote in his memoirs that, “the cotton and corn were ripe: men women and children above 10 years of age could be employed in saving this crop.” This work would be supervised by federal authorities. In November 1862, Grant appointed Chaplain John Eaton of the 27^th Ohio Regiment to oversee this operation.

Eaton, a native of New Hampshire and former superintendent of schools for Toledo, Ohio, was ordained as a minister during the summer of 1861 as the Civil War was underway. Eaton volunteered and became Chaplain of the 27^th Ohio. He was captured by the Confederates early in the war but was soon released and present with Grant’s army at the battles of Shiloh and Iuka. But when Eaton first read Grant’s order appointing him to the position, he was less than enthusiastic. He considered his new job “beyond the possibility of human achievement.” He sympathized with people desperately trying to flee slavery and recalled the conditions of these refugees with a degree of prejudice on his own part. He cited “nakedness” and sickness among “men, women and children in every form of disease . . . Flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escape.” Continuing, Eaton recalled that the enslaved refugees “were possessed by the wildest notions of what liberty might mean . . . such ignorance and perverted notions produced a veritable moral chaos.” Eaton recalled that Grant knew the immense responsibility he was about to bestow on Eaton when he greeted him (using prejudiced language of the period), “Oh, you are the man who has all these darkies on his shoulders.” Then, according to Eaton, Grant laid out some immediate practical concerns. Never forgetting his military operations, he wanted to safeguard his solders from “diseases and demoralization to which contact with this body of disorderly people subjected them.” Then Grant turned to the welfare of the refugees as winter was approached. Eaton remembered that care had to be provided for these people to survive the elements, and that many of the abandoned houses of Confederate sympathizers around the Grant Junction area were used for housing for the refugees. Still facing a housing shortage, old tents were used to make up the balance for shelter.

Despite some of the good intentions in dealing with the refugees who tried to escape slavery, unsanitary conditions, disease, racial prejudice, poor labor conditions, and outright violence made life miserable for many enslaved refugees. “The feeling against serving the Negro in any capacity still prevailed among the officers of our troops . . . to get a man who could be kind to the Negro and just to the Negro’s master was all but impossible,” Eaton recalled. In the end, Grant’s efforts to provide aid and protection to enslaved runaways was a remarkable social experiment with little precedent. While the relief camps did protect many enslaved refugees from a return to slavery, the conditions of these camps was less than ideal. As Brooks Simpson points out, “Grant’s major responsibility was to defeat the Confederacy, not to direct a social revolution.”

Further Reading

Eaton, John. Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen: Reminisces of the Civil War, With Special References to the Work For the Contrabands and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley. New York: Longmans Green and Co, 1907.

Grant Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1885. Penguin Books. 1999. Pgs 230-231.

Simpson, Brooks D. Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction 1861-1868. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991 Pgs 30-47

Simpson, Brooks D. Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000 Pgs 162-63.