Just ran across the following article on the topic of contrabands, more specifically a view by a man showing up as a potential employer at a contraband camp in Cairo, Illinois. it was picked up and published in a southern paper. It's November 1862 from here:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2006.05.0623:article=7
I've added a few paragraph breaks and a bit of bold to hopefully make it easier to read/skim.
Some thoughts... On the one hand, when a man heads into a camp calling it a menagerie, you know he's not exactly impartial about the humanity of the occupants. But on the other hand, he appears to be willing to purchase a "boy" (teenager apparently) to be trained as a physician, in the usual way that a new physician was apprenticed to an experienced one, regardless whether he attended a medical school. Was that just a test to offer one of them perfect equality and watch them refuse it and fail? Is he saying they did fail, either by disbelieving he was serious or disbelieving any of them could actually become a doctor? I'm curious what doctor around Cairo might be willing to train a black apprentice and how that would go over.
There's a sad but wonderful example of the Catch-22 they were caught in. On the one hand, there was the widespread cliche that black people didn't care about families or home and could be uprooted from such attachments without any guilt because they'd quickly adapt. Yet here, they're behaving normally by hoping to stay near family and home, and that can be interpreted as not wanting to head further up into Illinois and freedom and instead a sign that they would rather try to find their way as freemen back to home and live in the safety of slavery.
I don't doubt they had no sense of how much to ask for wages or how to negotiate for hire. That's kinda what happens when you prevent people from doing it all their lives. Though I wonder if slaves from Virginia or someplace with an annual slave-hiring season would be more shrewd and experienced, compared to those from Mississippi plantations
All right, enough of me yapping, here's the little article:
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While waiting this morning for a boat I concluded to go to the menagerie — a real show, the animals of which are partly caged and partly lying around loose in and about the old barracks over on the bank of the Mississippi. Such a sight ! old men and older women, heads as white as wool and more kinky — babies, from a week old all the way up till too big to be babies, all half clad and distressingly dirty — it is the elephant we got in the raffle, and now what to do with it is the question.
More than two thousand of these wretched beings have been sent here by military authority to prevent starvation. These are '"captives of war,"' most of them having been abandoned by their former masters, in and about Corinth, Inka, and Bolivar. Some are from Curtis's operations.--They have fallen into our hands in spite of our military policy to preserve the status of slavery, and their numbers are daily increasing. There is a great demand in this State for men to gather the corn and cut the winter weeds — so great that Northern Illinois is complaining that the farmers in Southern Illinois gabble up all the best as fast as they come. Men are here every day for hands.
Wishing to get into the notions of the darkies, I passed among them as an Illinois farmer, my army hat answering a capital purpose in the game. I proposed to hire a man. '"Dun no, sah. Where you want me to go ! What you gim 'ee !"' Going up to the dirtiest woman I saw, I proposed to her. '"Can't go sah. ! Is got four babies !"' '"But dar's old granny, I can't leave her."' '"Why, can't you go, too, granny !"' '"O, master, I's in hopes some days it will please do good Lord to give me back to old master."'
I tried a dozen or more, and found underlying the hopes of most of them was an ultimate return to their native land. The one refrain was--
"Oh, carry me back !"
Their local attachment is unconquerable, and they seem utterly unreconciled to separating the families. An over sanguine friend of mine, a physician, spoke to me the other day to procure a suitable boy for him, who, after serving a reasonable time as a hostier, [sic--hostler?] could be put to the science of physicing. I concluded to get the boy here; but
you ought to have seen the whites of their eyes and their ivory when I suggested studying to be a doctor. The bursting of a bombshell I would hardly have produced greater consternation. The facts here and the facts everywhere bid us look the subject fairly in the face. Until the time comes when these can return to their homes in peace and freedom, they must be managed here, and to do this some system of apprenticeship must be adopted.
These creatures have neither the intelligence nor the integrity necessary to contracting wisely for their own labor. One man asked $15 per month the year round, another $20, and another $5.
And yet philanthropists — so called — desire to turn free, and thus deprive them of their natural protection and shelter, four millions of just such beings, bringing desolation upon both whites and blacks.
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Bringing the