Reseña de A Rejected Alternative: Union Policy and the Relocation of Southern "Contrabands" at the Dawn of Emancipation.

A Rejected Alternative: Union Policy and the Relocation of Southern "Contrabands" at the Dawn of Emancipation. de Journal of Southern History Resumen del Libro

HISTORIANS CONTINUE TO DISAGREE ABOUT HOW DEEPLY THE NEGATIVE attitudes of northern whites toward blacks influenced politics during the Civil War. Increasingly scholars do agree that powerful prejudice against blacks prevailed among white northerners of foreign and southern birth and ancestry, especially in the Middle West, and some researchers go on to say that these feelings reinforced wartime support for black colonization abroad and delayed President Abraham Lincoln's embrace of emancipation. Yet only a few writers argue that antiblack prejudice in the North also influenced the Lincoln administration's decision to utilize and protect the freedpeople in the South, rather than to facilitate their movement out of the war-torn region. (1) This lack of academic consensus may stem in part from the scant consideration given to the ways racial anxieties affected politics in the staunchly antislavery New England states. Other than brief mentions, historians have also failed to scrutinize the consequences that racial attitudes there had for the plight of southern black refugees and for Union policy toward emancipation and the freedpeople. This article examines an influential case in point, a scarcely studied, abortive effort in 1862 to send black refugees from Virginia to Massachusetts. (2) The relocation initiative originated at Fortress Monroe, a Union foothold near the tip of Virginia's lower peninsula. It began September 12, 1862, when General John A. Dix, the Union commander, asked Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton for authorization to "communicate and make arrangements with the Governors of Massachusetts and other Northern States" to grant temporary asylum to approximately two thousand "colored men, women, and children" currently encamped at and near Old Point Comfort. Dix complained that the "contraband negroes"--runaway and abandoned slaves--at and near the fortress had "always been and are now a very great source of embarrassment to the troops in this garrison and in the camps hereabouts and to the white population in this neighborhood." If the fortress were approached or besieged by Confederates, he would, he claimed, "feel obliged to ship them all to the North," something that would need to be done without "needless delay" and "if possible, with the concurrence of the authorities of the State or States to which they may be sent." (3) Dix's urgency partly sprang from the vulnerability of the fortress to Confederate attack. (4) Equally troubling were the living conditions and treatment of refugees who lived within Union lines on a narrow strip of land that stretched from Hampton and Fortress Monroe to Newport News. Despite the efforts of the Union army, northern missionaries, and the refugees themselves, including many who had been put to work by the military, it proved difficult to provide adequate employment, medical care, food, shelter, and protection to so many uprooted people in hostile territory. (5) During and after General George B. McClellan's campaign on the peninsula in the summer of 1862, conditions worsened. Of the thirty-one hundred refugees living at or near the fortress in early September, Dix estimated that the thirteen hundred who had been housed in tents had been decimated by exposure and disease. Mortality and "privations" had even led "a considerable number" to obtain "permission to return to their masters...." Many privations were manmade, sometimes caused by Confederate troops and sympathizers but mainly brought on by Union soldiers whose conduct propelled Dix to claim that "close contact" between the refugees and the army was "not calculated to improve the moral condition of either...." (6)

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