“A Human Longing for Redress”: Contrabands and the Language of Debt in Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Literature

This essay examines the conflicted definition of contraband debt that pervaded New England society during the Civil War-era, focusing on the social and legal discourse that emerged after the passing of the First and Second Confiscation Acts. Although effectively discharging slaves of their labor to their southern owners, the confiscatory laws were interpreted as maintaining the slave’s status as debtor. New England relief workers frequently reinforced this perspective as well, adopting a free labor ideology that defined federal policy toward contrabands. Yet their written accounts also reveal the instability of this language of debt, especially when faced with slaves’ own affectional losses. It is to this conflicted view of the contraband figure that one New England author and volunteer nurse, Louisa May Alcott, turns. I argue that Alcott’s Hospital Sketches and “My Contraband” challenge this language of debt by redefining the cost of the war in strictly affectional terms: for Alcott it is slavery’s “theft” of family that places white society, not the contraband, in a form of indebted servitude.