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"A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation": The Word "Contraband" and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States
Kate Masur
| In his 1888 history of black military service during the Civil War, the African American historian George Washington Williams reminded readers that early in the war, the Union general Benjamin F. Butler had made the "startling and revolutionary" decision to label slaves fleeing to Union army lines "contraband of war." Williams narrated a story of policy making on the ground that was already legendary and remains a staple of histories of the Civil War. In late May 1861, just weeks after the war began, three enslaved men escaped to Union-occupied Fortress Monroe, on the central coast of Virginia. Their owner, a Confederate colonel, had planned to send them south to labor for the Confederacy and soon ordered an aide to collect them. Butler, commander at the fort, was reluctant to return such valuable resources to the Rebels and recognized that the men's labor might serve the Union cause. But it was difficult to justify retaining the men against their owner's will. At this early stage in the war, the United States government was wary of confiscating Confederate property and opposed to emancipating slaves. Butler improvised. He declared the men "contraband of war," a move that provided a legal veneer for holding the men and avoided challenging their status as property. "There was considerable comment in the press, in the pulpit, and in political as well as military circles," Williams wrote. And yet, he concluded, Butler's policy of holding human beings as contraband—a policy that left unchallenged the "false idea" of human property—"died almost before the country was certain it ever had official countenance."1 |
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The federal government never nationalized Butler's "contraband" policy; laws and executive orders quickly superseded his declaration. Yet as a name for fleeing slaves, "contraband" had significance beyond Williams's estimate and beyond anything Butler could have predicted. Such slaves became critical to the Union war effort, weakening the Confederacy by their flight and offering the Union valuable information and labor power. On battlefields and navy ships and in all manner of correspondence, those fugitives became "contrabands" in the parlance of military officials. Even more intriguing, the term jumped immediately into popular culture. Refugees from slavery were portrayed as contrabands by minstrel performers, on collectible postcards, in cartoons, drawings, and oil paintings, and in publications ranging from the Democratic humor weekly Vanity Fair to the abolitionist National Anti-Slavery Standard. "Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time," wrote the New York lawyer and army officer Charles Cooper Nott in late 1862. The word "leaped instantaneously to its new place, jostling aside the circumlocution 'colored people,' the extrajudicial 'persons of African descent,' the scientific 'negro,' the slang 'nigger,' and the debasing 'slave.'" As Nott recognized, "contraband" was a new and noteworthy addition to the already extensive vocabulary of race and servitude in the United States. He predicted that "those who love to ponder over the changes of language and watch its new uses and unconscious growth, must find in it a rare phenomenon of philological vegetation."2 |
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The "rare phenomenon" observed by Nott—the sudden explosion of "contraband" into popular culture—reflected Northern preoccupation with the meanings of emancipation and the future status of African Americans in the United States. As Nott and his contemporaries realized, people could choose among a range of words to refer to people of African descent, and different terms implied different views about black citizenship, dignity, and identity. The choice of the term "contraband" and the myriad ways people imagined the "contrabands" tell much about how Northerners, black and white, sought to make sense of the prospect of emancipation. Most fundamentally, the new usage of "contraband" signaled that the nation was at a crossroads. In the absence of other appropriate designations for fleeing slaves, the term was a placeholder whose appeal would fade once it became clear that the war would secure permanent emancipation. Because "contraband" had long been used to describe property, the term also implied the transitional status of the people to whom it referred. They were neither property with a clear owner (as in slavery) nor free people, but something in between. Some contemporaries debated and discussed the term itself: what it signified, whether and how to use it, and for how long. More often, however, people adopted it unselfconsciously and used it to express their own views on emancipation or on the character, needs, and desires of the nascent freedpeople. |
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