Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

North Carolina and Virginia, 1861–1864 301
population, free and slave, 14,870 were men of military age. Burnside, like many
Union officers, did not know what to do with them at first. “They are now a source
of very great anxiety to us,” he wrote in March 1862, one week after his force had
seized New Berne. “The city is being overrun with fugitives from the surrounding
towns and plantations. . . . It would be utterly impossible, if we were so disposed,
to keep them outside of our lines, as they find their way to us through woods and
swamps from every side.” 6
New Berne had a population of 5,432 that made it the state’s second largest
town and its second-ranking seaport. Most of the seven sites in North Carolina
defined as ports in a Treasury Department report issued just before the war were
small places, handling fewer than two dozen vessels a year. Their trade consisted
of shipping turpentine, barrel staves, and lumber, mostly to the West Indies. Barrel
staves were necessary for what the West Indies sent in return: molasses and sugar.
The combined trade of the state’s six smaller ports amounted to less than one-fifth
that of Wilmington, the state’s largest city, which remained in Confederate hands
for most of the war. Wilmington, in turn, handled only a fraction of the number of
ships that called at Baltimore and Charleston, the two closest seaports of any size.
Although North Carolina’s tiny ports shipped chiefly forest products, they offered
attractive anchorages both to Confederate blockade runners and to any force trying
to secure a beachhead. 7
Many escaped slaves from inland relied on black residents along the coast to
guide them to Union lines. Just as often, black mariners helped federal vessels
negotiate the tricky shoals and tidal creeks that lined the shore. In coastal North
Carolina, as elsewhere in the occupied Confederacy, black Southerners and federal
troops helped each other even as they caused problems for each other. While
black residents put their local knowledge to work for the Union Army, those who
found sanctuary at federal garrisons—tens of thousands of them throughout the
South—represented mouths to feed. The troops’ presence guaranteed the safety
of escaped slaves, but in return quartermasters and other officers exacted compulsory
labor for wages that were more often promised than paid. 8
Burnside soon discovered, as General Butler had at Fort Monroe, that the
solution to his problem was to put the newcomers to work. “The negroes continue
to come in,” he reported nearly two weeks after landing at New Berne,
“and I am employing . . . them on some earth fortifications in the rear of the
1993), pp. 19–21; Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 9 vols. (Wilmington,
N.C.: Broadfoot, 1998 [1863–1865]), 3: 333; Robert C. Black III, The Railroads of the Confederacy
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998 [1952]), p. xxv; Richard M. McMurry, Two
Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 24–28.
6 OR, ser. 1, 9: 199 (quotation); U.S. Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1864), pp. 350, 352, 354, 356, 358–59.
7 Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860, p. 359. “Commerce and Navigation
of the United States in 1860,” 36th Cong., 2d sess., H. Ex. Doc. unnumbered (serial 1,102), pp. 311,
322, 339, 341, 345, 350, 475, 499, 557, 561.
8 David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 153–66; Barbara B. Tomblin,
Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2009), pp. 31–33, 99–105 (Potomac-Chesapeake), 50–52 (North Carolina), 173–
75, 181–82 (pilots).