Closer to Freedom

Contrabands were enslaved people who, often at great risk, fled to Union camps located in the South during the Civil War. Both women and men fled to these camps, which initially did not have a policy regarding the status of fugitives from slavery. In August 1861, however, Congress and the Union Army determined that enslaved people would not be returned to their enslavers if they reached Union lines or camps in the South and would be categorized as human contraband. The Union Army soon began to pay contrabands for their labor, and in 1863, the Union Army started recruiting for the United States Colored Troops.

The catalyst for this redesignation of fugitives as contraband was the escape of three enslaved men to Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia, where they sought asylum. Benjamin Butler, a lawyer and the commander of Fort Monroe, refused to return the men to slavery. While the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act required that fugitives from enslavement be returned to their enslavers, the Confederacy had seceded from the Union and declared itself no longer part of the nation, so Butler reasoned that this law was not relevant to the Confederacy. He made the decision to hold them, instead as “contraband of war.”

The Union camps were not able to hold the thousands of enslaved people who fled slavery for the improved (yet not free) status of contraband. By the end of the Civil War, there were approximately 100 contraband camps set up outside Union Army camps. Contrabands labored for the Union Army, and many later joined the Army, helping to secure a Union victory.

Camp argues that so many enslaved people were able to find their way to Union camps because of the geographic knowledge that had been passed down from truants or from enslaved men who were given passes to move beyond plantation spaces. Because of this previous (limited) mobility, enslaved people had knowledge that enabled them to reach Union camps, where they worked to secure, among other things, greater mobility for all.

Abolitionists were people who advocated for the abolition, or end, of slavery. Unlike those involved in the antislavery movement, which often argued for the end of the transatlantic slave trade (but not the end of slavery), or those opposed to the spread of slavery to Western states but not opposed to the continuation of existing slavery, abolitionists insisted that all enslaved people should be emancipated and that the system of slavery should immediately be abolished.

In the United States there were two waves of abolitionism, one at the beginning of the 19th century and a more forceful wave in the early 1830s. Strengthened by the radically reduced cost of printing, this second wave of abolitionism was able to disperse abolitionist materials throughout the South from the mid-1830s up until the Civil War, as Camp discusses, and enslaved people were able to move these materials through the rival geography and then incorporate these materials (especially imagery) into their own rival geography in their domestic spaces, as California does. Camp pays attention to the ways the rival geography facilitates the movement not only of people through spaces, but also the material culture of abolitionism into the places where enslaved people lived.

While many earlier abolitionists were white, some of the most forceful abolitionists of the second wave of the movement were either fugitives from enslavement, such as Frederick Douglass initially was, or formerly enslaved people who had escaped and secured their freedom.

The movement was privy to other discriminations of the time, however, and women in the abolitionist movement, both white and Black, were often treated as second-class citizens. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, traveled from the United States with a group of abolitionist women to participate in the 1840 World Antislavery Convention, only to be told that they would only be allowed to listen to the proceedings behind a curtained-off cordon sanitaire. This prejudicial treatment by male abolitionists served as a catalyst for their working relation, which helped to lead to the presentation of the Declaration of Sentiments eight years later in Seneca Falls, which launched the women’s suffrage movement.

California was an enslaved woman living in Mississippi who is referred to repeatedly by the man who “manages” her, George Young, in his letters to California’s enslaver in Virginia as someone who believed she should be free. She engaged in behavior that Young was afraid would attract the attention of the slave patrol and potentially could have gotten her killed. California appeals to Young’s wife so that she and her husband might not be hired out to someone new and thus separated.

Camp is particularly interested in California’s defiant display of abolitionist imagery on the walls of her cabin and speculates that California was able to obtain this imagery through her husband Isaac, who was a ferryman and thus came in contact with Black sailors who often circulated abolitionists texts. Camp is not only interested in the action of the display of these materials. She is also interested in how California, who was most likely illiterate, interpreted the imagery, which would have been of subjugated—rather than liberated—enslaved people, the stock imagery of abolitionism. Camp imagines that California was inspired by the knowledge of northern abolitionists actively and openly working for emancipation. The display of California’s abolitionist “wallpaper,” for Camp, is not only about redefining slave quarters as places of everyday resistance; it also demonstrates the passions with which enslaved people lived and for which they took great risks.

Octavia Albert (née Rogers) (1853-1899) was born into enslaved status in Georgia in 1853. She attended Atlanta University and wanted to become a teacher. In 1874, she married Aristide Albert, and the two moved to Houma, Louisiana.

In 1879, Albert met Charlotte Brooks, and she started to interview formerly enslaved people, documenting their thinking and experiences within slavery as well as their memories and thoughts about slavery in the present moment of the late 1800s. The narrative of Charlotte Brooks forms the majority of The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, which was published posthumously in 1890.

Camp relies on the direct transcription of Albert’s interviews with enslaved people in The House of Bondage throughout Closer to Freedom. She does not just analyze the interviewees’ language, however. She pays attention to Albert’s language as well and the relationships that are revealed in the interviews, including misunderstandings and tensions that sometimes exist between Albert, who was emancipated while still a child, and enslaved people who had lived as adults in slavery.

Camp lingers over Albert’s reaction to interviewee Sallie Smith’s description of the punishment she received for being truant and her subsequent decision, soon after, to become a truant again. Albert’s surprise at such a decision, in the wake of a punishment that Smith describes as almost killing her, helps Camp to emphasize the weight of importance that some enslaved people placed on limited mobility, even in the context of the inevitable response of white violence. This importance astounded and confounded Albert.