Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner

Chapter 5. Roanoke Island

251 Chapter Five Roanoke Island (June 24, 1865–August 5, 1865) After the war, the Union troops that remained in the South became , in Edwin S. Redkey’s words, “the only official government in the ex-Confederate states.”1 Because the term of enlistment in the army was customarily three years, many white soldiers were mustered out at war’s end. However, because most of the black troops enlisted after emancipation, the majority of black troops were expected to continue their service. Thus a large number of black troops, in an ironic twist, became the keepers of those who were once their masters. Others were put in charge of camps and colonies made up of freed slaves, like the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, off the coast of North Carolina, where Turner’s regiment was sent in early June 1865. The Roanoke Island settlement, like many of the freedmen’s camps, formed somewhat organically after Union troops occupied 1. Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African -American Soldiers in the U.S. Army 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 161. 252 CHAPTER FIVE the island after the Battle of Roanoke Island in February 1862. The island attracted slaves from the island as well as from northeast North Carolina, and initially, the settlement was largely organized and run by the escaped slaves themselves.2 By January 1865 there were about 18,000 freedmen in Union-controlled eastern North Carolina; 3,091 of these were encamped on the island.3 Most camps were meant to be temporary, and conditions were primitive, if not downright deplorable . The Roanoke settlement was significantly more livable than most, in large part because it was intended to be permanent. The colony was laid out on a grid on the northwestern corner of the island. Each family was given a two-hundred by two-hundred-foot piece of land, nearly an acre, on which to build a house and plant a garden. For the Rev. Horace James, chaplain of the 25th Massachusetts , who was assigned to run the Freedmen’s Colony in 1863, “there was an important distinction between a camp and a colony: a camp provided a safe temporary haven for former slaves, while a colony offered the opportunity to mold a permanent community,” intended to be made up of the families of freedmen soldiers.4 James recruited teachers, mostly from the American Missionary Association, to establish schools on the island. However, the vicissitudes of war, as well as the ambivalent racial attitudes of the military leaders under whom James served, made the future success of the colony tenuous. Soldiers of the U.S.C.T., as well as those left on the island, complained of their treatment. Some were impressed into work crews for local construction projects, most notably, the canal at Dutch Gap; others worked without receiving pay. In one particularly disturbing instance, residents of the colony reported 2. Patricia C. Click, A Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedman ’s Colony, 1862–1867 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 32–36. 3. Click, Time Full of Trial, 11. 4. Click, Time Full of Trial, 12–13. ROANOKE ISLAND 253 that they had been accosted and restrained by members of the colony ’s (white) theatrical troupe, who cut off their hair to make wigs for their “minstrel chorus.”5 By the time Turner arrived on the island with the 1st U.S.C.T. in June 1865, the colony was on the verge of revolt. Holland Streeter, appointed by James to be superintendent of the island, had apparently been selling the rations intended for the freedmen (many of whom were families of black enlisted soldiers and thus guaranteed protection by the government). Col. John H. Holman, commander of the 1st U.S.C.T., found the island in a state of “gross mismanagement ,” and wrote to the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau that the inhabitants of the island had “lost all confidence in the persons appointed to conduct their affairs. . . . There is a great degree of corruption and disonesty.”6 In July 1865, Streeter was tried and convicted by a military commission for embezzlement, fraud, and “cruel treatment to the colored women under his care.”7 Turner’s letters from Roanoke portray the colony at a critical point between success and failure. In his last letter, he writes, “I do not expect...