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Reviewed by:
  • Bluejackets & Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy
  • Michael Sokolow
Bluejackets & Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy. By Barbara Brooks Tomblin. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2009.

In June 1862, a slave named William Summerson made a bid to run away from his masters in Charleston, South Carolina. The son of a mixed-blood slave woman and a white Northern man, Summerson had been separated from his mother at the age of seven and later worked on riverboats, at an arsenal, and as a hotel waiter. With the arrival of the Civil War and the Union naval blockade of Southern ports, the twenty-three-year-old seized the opportunity to escape. With the help of fellow slaves, Summerson and his wife hid in rice barrels to avoid Confederate patrols, and then slogged for hours through coastal marshland until they sighted Union gunboats. In short order the refugees found themselves cheered by the crew and were fed a delicious hot breakfast by their rescuers, who saw them safely out of Charleston and slavery (35-37).

In Bluejackets & Contrabands, Barbara Brooks Tomblin skillfully reconstructs the experiences of many Southern black refugees like the Summersons. From the outset of the Civil War, invading Union military forces were forced to cope with growing numbers of escaped slaves who sought refuge from their Southern masters. After some confusion and uncertainty in the early months of the conflict as to how to deal with the runaways, the Union command adopted a policy treating fugitive slaves as seized property of war, or contraband. Individual commanders were authorized to provide shelter and resources to the contrabands and even to hire them on to advance the war effort. Concentrating on the Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia coasts where contraband populations appear to have been the heaviest, Tomblin reveals the stories of dozens of these individuals. She vividly reconstructs their perilous journeys to reach the northern forces and their subsequent contributions to the Union cause as laborers, naval personnel, coastal pilots, and providers of vital military intelligence.

Tomblin relies most heavily on military correspondence drawn from the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navy and Army, which were compiled and [End Page 137] published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the vast majority of her sources were written by military officers, the author's conclusions are necessarily based on evidence given by observers and policymakers. Consequently the contrabands' stories are told mostly through the words of the whites who encountered contrabands rather than those of the ex-slaves themselves. Because the majority of the contrabands are presumed to have been illiterate, this necessary limitation often reveals as much about white observers as it does about their black subjects. Both conscious and unconscious prejudice abound in many of the cited letters and journal entries, and a wonderful but brief section of the book exposes some of these attitudes and the interpersonal conflicts that they caused (200-208).

Bluejackets & Contrabands is at its best when telling the individual stories that comprise the heart of the book. However, it is less successful at situating its subjects in a larger context. There do not appear to be estimates regarding the overall number of contrabands seized by the Union Navy, nor a focused geographical breakdown of their approximate numbers or proportions in different coastal areas. Because the sources are concentrated along the eastern seaboard, there is no reference to whether the Navy also seized contrabands from regions along the Mississippi River or Gulf of Mexico. The naval sources are examined in isolation, and the work might have benefited from a broader comparison to U.S. Army treatment of and experiences with contrabands. Finally, the absence of African American voices, while understandable, handicaps the book. Perhaps further research into unpublished testimony by Southern-born blacks, particularly U.S. Navy pension records, will enrich our understanding in this area.

Barbara Brooks Tomblin has done an admirable job revealing a crucial but little-known aspect of United States naval history during the Civil War. Her work will be enlightening for both scholarly and general audiences.

Michael Sokolow
Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
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