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  • Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy by Barbara Brooks Tomblin
  • Donald R. Shaffer (bio)
Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy. By Barbara Brooks Tomblin. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. Pp. 373. Cloth, $39.95.)

While not as extensive as the literature on African Americans in the Union army, writing on blacks in the Union navy has grown recently. For many years, David Valuska’s 1973 dissertation, “The Negro in the Union Navy, 1861–1865” (belatedly published in 1993), was the standard work on this topic. Valuska’s work finally was supplanted with publication of Steven [End Page 420] Ramold’s excellent Slaves, Sailors, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy (2002). The topic has also benefited from the work of Joseph P. Reidy and his colleagues at Howard University, who have labored to identify every African American who served in the Union navy, which for some time has been a matter of uncertainty.1

Shifting the scope of inquiry into this topic is Barbara Brooks Tomblin’s Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy. Rather than concentrate exclusively on black men who joined the Union navy, Tomblin examines the broader interaction of the Union navy with the “contrabands”: slaves who sought freedom within Union lines during the Civil War. Tomblin also seeks to connect the study of African Americans and the Union navy more broadly with the scholarship on freedpeople in the Civil War South that has developed since the 1960s.

Indeed, the story Bluejackets and Contrabands relates will be familiar to anyone conversant with the history of the Union navy and the history of emancipation during the Civil War. Tomblin finds the command structure of the U.S. Navy unprepared for dealing with escaped slaves at the conflict’s start. Naval leaders, from Secretary Gideon Welles on down, focused initially on the considerable problem of mounting a naval blockade of the Confederacy. They did not anticipate that as Union ships moved into coastal and inland waterways in the South, slaves, eager for freedom, would seek sanctuary on those vessels. Naval officers, like their army counterparts, had to decide whether to offer the slaves protection or turn them away.

What made the Union navy different from the army in regard to contrabands, writes Tomblin, was the abolitionist leanings of Secretary Welles and the long-standing presence of African Americans as sailors aboard U.S. Navy ships. For decades before the Civil War, desperate for personnel, the navy, unlike the army, enlisted free and foreign-born blacks. Hence, although some captains initially refused freedpeople refuge on their ships, the Union navy was much quicker than the Union army to recognize African Americans as an asset to the war effort and adopt policies to engage them. For instance, while the recruitment of black men in the Union army did not begin in earnest until late 1862, Welles in late summer 1861 authorized the enlistment of escaped slaves into the Union navy.

The favorable policy toward freedpeople extended beyond able-bodied men who might be of direct benefit to the Union navy. “By the end of the first year of the Civil War,” writes Tomblin, “the Navy Department had established a policy of welcoming fugitive blacks, both slave and free, on [End Page 421] board Union blockading ships; offering them protection from claims by disloyal southern masters; and providing them with food and shelter” (18). After establishing the favorable policy of the Union navy toward freedpeople, Tomblin explores how slaves escaped to naval vessels, the contraband camps the navy established for them, and the value of African Americans as an intelligence source and their other contributions to Union naval success, especially as pilots and sailors. She explores joint army-navy operations and the end of the war as it pertained to the relationship between freedpeople and the Union navy.

In short, Bluejackets and Contrabands makes a laudable effort to be thorough, perhaps too much so. Certainly this book would have benefited from better organization and editorial work. Clearly, certain material, such as the chapter on joint Union navy and army operations, could have been eliminated or brought in piecemeal in other places...

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