Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony, 1862-1867 (review)

Patricia C. Click begins her book by explaining why she based her work's title on the words of Ella Roper, an American Missionary Association teacher who served the Roanoke Island freedmen's colony. Roper's use of the word "trial," Click explains, offers two meanings: one, that the colony itself was a challenge for all who participated in developing and sustaining it; two, that the colony offered a "trial run for some significant ideas—free universal public education, small freeholding, wage labor—that could have drastically altered society and culture in late nineteenth-century North Carolina" (xviii). The strength of this work is the author's ability to blend together both meanings of "trial."

Click's study begins in February 1862 with Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside's capture of Roanoke Island, whose population of 590 inhabitants included 395 white people, 24 free blacks, and 171 slaves. The next critical moment came in April 1863 when the United States military appointed Rev. Horace James, an army chaplain from Massachusetts, as "'Superintendent of all the Blacks' in the Department of North Carolina" (40). James's guiding hand in the colony's destiny appears throughout the book.

One of the book's most intriguing aspects concerns James's vision of the "colony's social mission" (59). Click describes how James's beliefs contained "utopian overtones" (13) that led him to compare the "socially progressive goals of the freedmen's colony with the materialistic goals of [Sir Walter] Raleigh's 'lost colony'" (14). Click also emphasizes James's pragmatic side, particularly his emphasis on the need for the freedpeople to develop "light industrial and domestic manufacturing" (62) to attain self-sufficiency. However, no matter how supportive James was, the island simply could not sustain a population that reached 3,500, or six times its wartime level. Further, because a substantial share of its productive black men were drawn off as African Americans entered the Union army and many others served as civilian workers for the military, the majority of the women and children left in the colony depended on the military for their survival.

This dependence placed the colonists in a particularly vulnerable position. Despite the efforts by James, the missionaries, and the freedpeople, Click explains, "the colony did not figure very highly in the military's decision-making process" (126). Not only did military movements play "havoc with the idea of a settled Roanoke colony" (135)—as best shown when the island was flooded with new refugees after the fall of Plymouth to Confederates in 1864—but also the forced impressments of the former slaves to serve the Quartermaster's Department and the delayed payment of their wages compelled these men's families to rely on military rations. Near the end of the war a crisis came when James cut rations to the families of soldiers despite these soldiers' obligation to fulfill their three-year commitments. In March 1865 the freedmen responded by writing President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to complain about their poor treatment. The last straw came when Horace Streeter, James's assistant superintendent on the island, was convicted by a military commission for "misapplication and embezzlement of property entrusted to his care" (147). Because James came to his assistant's defense, his relationship with the colony would never be the same. Further, a growing consensus in the Freedmen's Bureau, which replaced the military on March 3, 1865, was that the needs of the Roanoke freedpeople would be met best if they left the island.

For Click the decisive factor in the dissolution of the colony was the issue of land claims. Although at the outset of his tenure James and the freedpeople had laid out a new village as the focus on the colony and despite...