‘Knocking Apart the Bricks of Slavery’

In his latest book, Tom Zoellner addresses a little-known aspect of the American Civil War and one of the key elements in the destruction of America’s “peculiar institution.” The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War describes how classifying escaped enslaved people as “contraband” resulted in hundreds of thousands fleeing to Union army lines. Under protection of federal guns, newly free individuals established camps and even semi-permanent settlements where autonomy could be savored for the first time.

Zoellner, author of multiple nonfiction books and a professor at Chapman University and Dartmouth College, wrote about the end of slavery in the British Empire in Island on Fire, winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award. In The Road Was Full of Thorns, he examines the death of U.S. slavery, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the enslaved and the United States government, which pursued a wartime policy that encouraged people to leave their masters and seek freedom in areas controlled by the army. It was a remarkable migration that drove events as much as it was a product of them.

In civilian life, Benjamin Butler was a lawyer, a champion of the working class in his native Massachusetts. As a brigadier general commanding Fort Monroe in Virginia during the first spring of the war, Butler was confronted with a problem in the form of three escaped enslaved men who turned themselves over to the U.S. Army. The general, needing workers to build fortifications, decided they should remain with the military as civilian employees. When their enslaver came looking for them, Butler, an attorney not afraid to push the bounds of legal precedent, refused to return the men. They were, he decreed, “contraband of war” who could not be handed over to an enemy engaged in combat against the United States.

Word of Butler’s action spread quickly through the enslaved population and to the halls of government. By the end of the year, the Confiscation Act of 1861 effectively made Butler’s improvised decision an official policy, setting free any enslaved person who could get to U.S. Army lines. The law created a flood of people seeking a new life of independence. As Zoellner notes, “As many as eight hundred thousand people – a fifth of the enslaved population of the entire South – left a plantation and lived in a contraband camp at some point during the Civil War.”

The camps ranged from squalid fields of tents to orderly settlements with small homes. Though local army and government officials were not always friendly, the camps were visible reminders of the cause of the war and contributed to a remarkable shift in public perception of slavery and those who suffered under it. Abraham Lincoln, who regularly passed by and even visited a large camp in Washington, D.C., was moved by the people who, freed of bondage, steadfastly sought education and jobs. When he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln drew on the contraband policy and the military reasoning that the enslaved must be removed from Southern control to hasten the end of the war.

The policy was very effective. When the army began accepting Black men into uniform for combat service, the contraband camps became recruiting centers. The desire to safeguard their freedom and gain the freedom of those still enslaved drove enlistment. The new soldiers served with distinction and by the end of the war accounted for 10 percent of Union forces. Their contribution to victory was enormous.

Black people could also be effective spies in Southern territory. Abraham Galloway of North Carolina escaped slavery, then offered to return and gather information. His reports provided crucial information to Union authorities, and he was included in an 1864 meeting of Black leaders with President Lincoln to discuss post-war civil rights.

One of Zoellner’s main points is that emancipation was not a single moment in time or a single proclamation. It was a process, a messy, complicated, sometimes improvised series of events, “gaining speed, persuading the reluctant, transforming the ground with hard facts, knocking apart the bricks of slavery until the whole edifice came down.” The Road was Full of Thorns is a well told, inspiring story of what became, in Lincoln’s enduring words, “a new birth of freedom.”