Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Middle Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, 1863–1865 295
Mississippi did large numbers of U.S. Colored Troops finish the war reasonably
near the places where they had enlisted, but still at some distance from their families.
During their service, most of the Tennesseans had covered the country from
Dalton, Georgia, in the east to Decatur, Alabama, in the west and as far north as
the Kentucky state line. They had left their families behind and felt a strong desire
to see them again. 96
Company commanders would specify the number of men who could request furloughs,
the term of the furloughs (usually ten or twenty days), and the purpose: “their
families are residing with their former masters, and these men desire to visit them to
provide for them untill their term of service expires,” was the formula in Company B
of the 110th USCI. Commanding officers had authority to extend a furlough because
of sickness, whether of the enlisted man or of one of his relatives. 97
Black soldiers who received furloughs to visit their families often found them
living with their former masters or in the contraband camps established by Union
occupiers at several sites: Nashville, Clarksville, and Gallatin, Tennessee, and
Huntsville, Alabama. Living conditions in the camps had attracted the attention of
War Department investigators as early as the spring of 1864. While touring the region,
inspecting camps and collecting testimony, they learned that residents’ welfare
depended almost entirely on the energy and dedication of a camp’s commander.
The general at Nashville was “culpably negligent,” they reported, while the
chaplain in charge at Huntsville “was wholly devoted to the care of its inmates.” 98
The camp at Clarksville had provided 136 soldiers for the Union Army; the one
at Gallatin, “several hundred.” The investigators’ report made clear the government’s
responsibility toward them. “If we take colored soldiers into our armies, . . . we must
take them under the obligation to take care of the families that would be otherwise
left in want. When the enlisting colored soldiers are assured that the care of their
families shall be the care of the government, that assurance must be made good. If we
exact good faith from them, we must keep good faith with them.” Further, the investigators
recommended establishment of a federal office “nominally military, under
the general authority and supervision of the War Department, . . . for this distinct
service.” The U.S. Senate published its report on 27 February 1865. 99
Four days later, Congress passed a law it had been tailoring for more than fourteen
months to “establish a bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees.” The
term refugees applied usually to white Unionists displaced by the fighting; freedmen
generally referred to black Southerners of any age and both sexes, including
those who had been free before the war. Even these latter saw changes in their legal
status as the coming of emancipation and the war’s end swept away many antebellum
statutes. An agency of the War Department called the Bureau of Refugees,
96 On the situation in the Department of the Cumberland, see Ira Berlin et al., eds., The
Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 265, and The Wartime
Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 376–
85. Documentation is missing for most Louisiana-raised U.S. Colored Troops regiments that were
still stationed there at the end of the war.
97 Abstracts 81 and 110 (“their families”) in Letterbook, 110th USCI, Regimental Books, RG
94, NA.
98 “Condition and Treatment of Colored Refugees,” 38th Cong., 2d sess., S. Ex. Doc. 28 (serial
1,209), pp. 9 (“culpably”), 12 (“was wholly”).
99 Ibid., pp. 9, 11 (“several”), 20 (“If we take”), 22 (“nominally”).