Doing "Good Brave Work"
Harriet Tubman’s Testimony at Beaufort, South Carolina
Fall 2000, Vol. 32, No. 3
By Benjamin Guterman
”I stop at the ‘Savan House’ opposite the Arsnel,” says Harriet Tubman in a document recently uncovered at the National Archives. This find is noteworthy, for Tubman left few written words, speaking forcefully instead through a long life of secretive, heroic deeds “witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women” under “the midnight sky and the silent stars.”1 Less known is that this Moses of her people was a wartime heroine who served capably as a Civil War spy and nurse at Beaufort, South Carolina, from 1862 through early 1865. This article explores how this newfound document expands our knowledge of both Tubman’s wartime efforts and the social conditions of the freedpeople for whom she toiled.
The document is a court-martial record containing Tubman’s verbatim testimony on June 5, 1863, in the trial of Pvt. John E. Webster, the superintendent of the Beaufort contraband camp. Researchers Thomas and Beverly Lowry came across the testimony at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., during their compilation of a comprehensive, computerized database of eighty-five thousand Union army court-martials.2 Tubman’s courtroom answers are fascinating for at least two reasons. First, they are her exact words, and can thus stir the reader’s historical imagination. This document joins the few letters she dictated as the only records through which we directly hear her historical voice. Second, she testified along with other freedmen at the trial, enjoying a legal right that was strongly contested in northern states in the decades before the Civil War but extended by the army in wartime. Yet the content and substance of this testimony is not particularly colorful and dramatic. She had a courtroom obligation to answer clearly and succinctly. And the questions pertained to the practical matter of Webster’s alleged theft and peddling of army foodstuffs intended for the refugees. The court record, then, features her not as the famed liberator but as one of several witnesses whose collective testimony takes us to the heart of the refugee camp experience.
While we naturally hope to learn more of her activities in the camp, the document narrowly addresses an administrative problem there, compelling us to revisit the refugee problem in more depth. We do learn, incidentally, something of Tubman’s residence, access to the commanding general, and economic activities. But the two stories—her tireless and diverse commitment to relief efforts and the contraband camp experience—cannot be separated.
The Port Royal Experiment
When Tubman decided to go to the South Carolina sea islands, it was to help alleviate the suffering of a people abruptly freed and in need of the basic necessities of life. The invasion of the South Carolina sea islands by Union forces on November 6, 1861, established an important base for later advance on Charleston. Union forces occupied several islands between Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, that included Port Royal Island, Ladies Island, St. Helena Island, Hilton Head Island, part of Edisto Island, and other smaller ones. The occupation immediately ended the slave-labor plantation system that had guided social relations in that area for generations. All planters fled before the advance of Union landing parties, leaving behind their homes, furnishings, clothing, substantial stores of cotton, and a population of laborers who had been totally dependent upon that insulated community. The now ex-slaves remained on the land, skeptical at first of Union soldiers. Some hid for weeks with little food and clothing. Others survived in the short term on the food stores left by masters. They could no longer count on regular rations from their masters, and many black foremen, or “drivers,” withheld food by keeping storehouses locked, as they did before. When freedmen arrived at army posts, they were not always treated generously.
The army’s task was formidable because its goals were not purely military. While it sought to establish a base for future advance on Charleston, it also was charged with transforming plantations into wage-based agricultural units. The area had approximately ten thousand freedpeople, now refugees, on approximately two hundred plantations, extending over sixty thousand acres. Commanders, executing the President’s policies, sought to keep freedpeople on the land as an experienced peasantry engaged in cotton production. These goals would continue the agricultural economy long profitable in the area, train freedpeople in wage-labor self-sufficiency, and raise revenue from cotton for the federal government.
The challenge was unavoidably a social one, for it was in the islands that “the system of Negro slavery seems to have reached its furthest development with the least contact with external civilization.”3 Because they were the “human building material” of the new social order in the region, freedpeople needed training in self-sufficiency as well as social guidance and medical care. The sea island enterprise, soon known as the “Port Royal Experiment,” aroused the imagination of sympathetic northerners, especially abolitionists, for rehabilitation of the ex-slaves. Activists eager for such work volunteered to go to the islands, for “Port Royal was by far the best place to observe black men in their new roles.”4
Harriet Tubman, like all Boston residents in 1861, heard of the great human need, reading Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman’s call for “immediate action on the part of a highly favored and philanthropic people” to teach freedpeople “the rudiments of civilization and Christianity.”5 The Treasury Department’s agent, Edward L. Pierce, conceived of an agricultural regime that would banish slavery by proving “the superiority of the free labor system.”6 He assembled northern volunteers for the sea islands who were sponsored in part by the Educational Commission of Boston, the Freedman’s Relief Association of New York, and the Port Royal Relief Committee of Philadelphia. On March 9, 1862, Pierce arrived in Beaufort with forty-one men and twelve women of all backgrounds—college students, teachers, lawyers, businessmen, and farmers. These were the first of scores of volunteers for duties in South Carolina. The Treasury Department sent its contribution of ten thousand dollars for salaries and fifteen thousand dollars for implements, seeds, and mules.
Harriet Tubman sought to join this effort. She saw the South Carolina experiment as the culmination of the long, pre–Civil War struggle for emancipation and an opportunity to extend her earlier emancipation efforts.7 She was encouraged by abolitionist friends and officially sponsored by Gov. John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, who arranged for her to serve as a spy, scout, and nurse, when needed.8 Tubman never fully shed her rustic demeanor and could communicate with freedpeople and gain their trust far more effectively than military officers could. Even so, she recalled that “Dey laughed when dey heard me talk, an’ I could not understand dem, no how.”9 She arrived at Beaufort in May 1862, where she assumed special duties under General Sherman. She nursed wounded soldiers, both black and white, and worked at the contraband hospital for freedpeople under the direction of Dr. Henry K. Durrant.10 She also passed through the countryside with select black spies to observe Confederate positions.11
Tubman undoubtedly saw the kind of poverty and confusion that Pierce’s missionaries witnessed two months before. One young volunteer recalled large crowds of freedpeople along Bay Street viewing the incoming vessel. She observed that their makeshift clothing gave them a grotesque appearance. Women wore “old, castoff soldiers’ coats, with ‘crocus bags’ fastened together with their own ravellings, for skirts,” and men “had strips of gay carpeting, or old bags, or pieces of blanket, in which they cut arm-holes and wore as jackets.” To her, they were yet an indistinct people, once “‘massa’s niggers,’ now refugees and contrabands.”12 These workers, known as “Gideonites,” worked on the outlying islands as superintendents, teachers, nurses, and doctors. Most naturally aimed to promote white standards in such areas as behavior, marital relations, and education. Such ethnocentric beliefs, however, belied the complexity of black behavior during and after slavery. As Willie Lee Rose wrote of those contrary perceptions, “the Negro could be a provident manager of his affairs, or . . . a lavish spender; he could be the lazy, slipshod workman slavery had made him or a docile and pliable laborer inured to toil and ready to make his way in the world.”13 These perceptions often left missionaries and military commanders convinced of the need for great changes in freedpeople and asking if they would work and fight for their freedom.
Difficulties in the agricultural program through the balance of 1862 led some to the refugee camps at Beaufort and Hilton Head. Many freedpeople balked at growing cotton and were frustrated further when wages were paid late or not at all. Others fled the intermittent Confederate and Union raiding parties that took livestock and food supplies. Finally, Gen. David Hunter’s attempt to draft all able-bodied black men in May 1862 disturbed families and the plantation program.
In late April 1862 Gen. Rufus Saxton assumed control of the area as military governor of the Department of the South. He divided the area into three districts with a primary superintendent over each, began reorganizing plantation labor in early 1863 from a gang system to one based on individual wage incentives, and created a “cotton fund” to pay wages.14 Saxton continued the educational and relief measures in the islands, so that by the end of 1862 “more than 1,700 children were attending school on St. Helena, Ladies, and Port Royal Islands alone.”15 These measures, however, were not successful enough in maintaining stability and livelihood among freedpeople in the islands.
The Beaufort Contraband Camp
While the primary purpose of the Port Royal Experiment was to rehabilitate freedpeople on the land, a percentage of indigent poor and sick remained in need of aid. Not all could survive on the abandoned lands. They lacked food, clothing, and medical care. Hundreds came to the army’s refugee or “contraband camps,” at Beaufort, Hilton Head, Otter Island, and Bay Point.
Beaufort was a resort town with elegant homes facing the river. Before the war, the population of two thousand swelled in summer with the influx of planters from the islands and the mainland. Now, with the flight of all Southern whites, the homes and streets were eerily quiet and housed the varied needs of officers, soldiers, and refugees. William Gannet, who arrived on March 8, 1862, with Pierce’s missionaries, was struck by the general desertion, noting the “dilapidated fences, tumble-down outbuildings, untrimmed trees with lots of dead branches, weedy walks and gardens.”16 General Saxton established his headquarters in the Heyward home, which faced the Whitehall ferry and commanded a six-mile southward view of the Beaufort River.
The Beaufort camp was established almost immediately after the Union takeover of the islands. Bernard K. Lee of Boston, appointed general superintendent on November 9, 1861, testified that he started with sixty to seventy refugees, but “they soon came in rapidly in parties of 10, 20, 50 and 100.”17 Gen. Rufus Saxton also reported these arrivals on the same day, stating that “it will soon be necessary to furnish them with coarse clothing.”18 This influx also occurred at other camps. By February 1862, approximately six hundred freedpeople gathered at the Union camp at Hilton Head, where they were housed in a community of hastily built barracks soon called Mitchelville. On her arrival in at Hilton Head in 1862, the teacher Charlotte Forten wrote of a desolate view “stretching out into the sea, with no visible dwellings upon it, except the rows of small white-roofed houses which have lately been built for the freed people.”19 Edward Pierce reported that at the Beaufort camp “Commodious Barracks have been erected for these people, and a guard protects their quarters.”20
The camps also served as work assignment centers for the army’s Quartermaster Department. In March 1862 Capt. Hazard Stevens ordered the superintendent of contrabands in Beaufort to “retain within the city such number of contraband Negroes as are requisite for the ordinary labor at the Government works.” He established rates for various tasks.21 Freedmen earned from five dollars to twelve dollars a month, depending on skills, with three dollars deducted for rations. Men came from the plantations to the Beaufort camp to find regular employment at better pay and with reliable wages. Each morning they answered roll call and received their assignments to work. They were sent off as porters, hospital stewards, gardeners, grave diggers, masons, carpenters, wood cutters, cooks, dockworkers, engineers at the corn mill, and dock hands.22 Brig. Gen. Isaac I. Stevens reported that in May 1862 there were two hundred men employed in “loading and unloading vessels,” repairing and enlarging the Beaufort dock, repairing boats, cutting wood and timber for the bakeries, “cultivating the military farm,” and “policing the town of Beaufort.”23 One officer believed that organizing the men “as military laborers into brigades, [and marching them to work] with badges around their hats labelled ‘United States Service,’” inspired them with “self reliance.”24 As requests from local employers came in, some were hired out to local hotels and bakeries. Tubman shared those relief goals, writing at Beaufort that she was “trying to find places for those able to work . . . while at the same time they learn to respect themselves by earning their own living.”25
Some women also came to the camps for protection or to explore life outside the plantation. Some followed their husbands to the camps. There they were assigned work as washerwomen, servants to officers, or attendants at the hospital. They could receive medical attention for their children. However, many witnesses stressed that proximity to soldiers had a harmful effect on newly freed women, one testifying that scores of young women “flock” from countryside to Hilton Head and Beaufort to “seek some new excitement, or what is worse to live by lasciviousness.”26
The Court-Martial and Trial
Camp residents were dependent on the superintendent for orderly work assignment and fair treatment and distribution of rations. Pvt. John E. Webster, Company G, Forty-seventh Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers, assumed his duties at the Beaufort camp on October 25, 1862. It was unusual for a private to hold that position, but Webster may have been selected for his relative maturity. He was born in Yorkshire, England, and was thirty-nine years old in 1863.27 But it also seems that it was difficult to retain the early superintendents and that some were unreliable. Edward Pierce recorded in February 1862 that the Beaufort camp did not “till within a few days” have a general superintendent, “but have been under the charge of persons detailed for the purpose from the army.” And the previous one employed a “manner and language” that was “to say the least, not elevating.”28
On his first day, Webster recorded that 177 workers were assigned to various duties. His last entry on May 22, 1863, shows a roll call of 385, with a total of 97 sent out as dock hands. Activity at the camp had grown, but there are no other indications of unusual activities in the records.29
The court-martial of Pvt. John E. Webster commenced on June 5, 1863, in Beaufort, S.C., with Capt. and Judge Advocate G. P. Davis of the Fifty-second Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers presiding and seven officers sitting in judgment. They considered six specifications against Private Webster, all pertaining to a charge of “Embezzling and misapplying Military stores.” The third and fourth specifications named Harriet Tubman, stating that Webster sold her one barrel of brown sugar on March 20 and fifty pounds of the same on May 2, 1863, “which had been delivered to him by the United States for Issues to Contrabands.” The first charge accused Webster of selling sugar to Walter D. Plowden, “a colored man”; the second charge cited his sale of various stores to S. W. Bennett, proprietor of the Stevens House Hotel; the fifth charged that Webster withheld rations from Dick Murray, a contraband employed in the Quartermaster Department; the sixth that he withheld “lawfull” rations from a contraband named Lucius.
Webster was found guilty of the first, second, and fourth specifications and sentenced to six months of labor without pay. His service record shows that he was again working at the commissary in April 1864.
The Testimony
Testimony of Harriet Tubman in the court-martial of Pvt. John E. Webster, June 5, 1863.
The testimonies of the several freedmen and whites in the Webster court-martial provide some insights into life in the camp and in Beaufort. They highlight the new fact of black testimony in the courtroom, identify Tubman’s current place of residence, suggest some of her daily activities, and identify the type and quantity of rations issued and the work done by freedmen.
The first striking point about the testimony is the fact that freedpeople were freely and openly called as witnesses. This stemmed from the wartime reality that they served as spies and contributed intelligence of Confederate troop movements. In that capacity, they were trusted and invaluable. In addition, some commanders shared the abolitionists’ humanist sentiment that blacks must now be schooled as citizens and brought into the legal and social norms of northern society. Black testimony, therefore, was routinely relied upon. For example, a plantation superintendent reported on March 18, 1862, that he could find “negroes” to testify to disorderly conduct by drunken sailors on St. Helena Island.30
Such ideas of black rights were in transition, in part because military and civil leaders were still evolving their understanding of black culture and consequently rethinking freedpeople’s roles in and contributions to wartime life at Port Royal. The American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission visited Beaufort in 1863 and questioned witnesses exhaustively on the topics of black family, morality, conceptions of truth, honesty, religion, aptitude, education, and abilities to adopt white social, economic, and legal norms.31 While this cultural education proceeded, the military extended rights selectively and imposed certain laws in South Carolina between 1862 and 1865 that curbed black rights. Those measures included some impressment for military service, curfews, and the need for passes to travel to and from Beaufort. Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, officials viewed blacks as “contrabands,” or captured persons. Now they recognized that freedmen were irrevocably free and must be guaranteed certain basic legal powers that included not only the right to testify but also to contract and control their own economic condition.
There were ten witnesses in the court-martial. The six “colored” witnesses were Walter D. Plowden, Harriet Tubman, Lucius Dubson, Nat Simmons, Isaac Blake, and Thomas Blake. The other witnesses were shopkeeper John Lilly; Sgt. John G. Van Camp, Company H, 104th Regiment, Pennsylvania Vols.; Pvt. Charles B. Znick; and Lt. W. G. Moon, Company D, Fifty-fifth Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers.
The black witnesses were addressed by first and last names. The assignment of surnames for contrabands was a policy that was greatly accelerated during the military occupation of the sea islands. In part, it was a symbol of free status, a way of beginning anew in freedom. Freedman Harry McMillan emphasized this new spirit in testimony before the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, stressing that “We call each other colored people, black people, but not negro because we used that word in secesh times.”32 General Saxton’s naming policy is evident in the Beaufort contraband camp records, where freedpeople were initially recorded in ledgers by their first name, followed by a column for their master’s name. In practice, the two names were soon joined for most individuals. Thus, the ledger section for “Weekly Ticket List of Detailed Contrabands” records that in July 1862 Jupiter Jenkins was a cook for single men, Prophet Gregory was a department messenger, and Sarah Gibbs, Sylvia Simmons, Martin Johnson, and Peter Grimble were “in the employ of Gen. Saxton.”33
Tubman’s testimony was one of several given in the case against Webster by both blacks and whites. She answered fifteen questions, mostly related to Webster’s attempt to sell her sugar, and her responses are recorded verbatim. The judge advocate first asked her where she lived, to which she replied that she stayed at the “‘Savan House’ opposite the Arsnel,” likely near the contraband camp.34 She then affirmed that she knew the accused for nine to ten months, although she had been there for about twelve to thirteen months. When asked if she purchased a barrel of sugar from Webster on May 20, 1863, she replied that it was not a barrel and that “We got sugar twice.” The second purchase was for forty to fifty pounds of brown sugar. She also replied that she did not purchase any other military supplies and that she did not remember if it was the same type of sugar regularly rationed to the contrabands. She also could not remember the price paid.
Tubman purchased sizable quantities of foodstuffs because she supported herself by baking in the evenings. She declined rations and compensation, after some early complaints from contrabands, because she did not want to draw attention to herself or give the appearance of special privilege. By day, she worked as a nurse in either the contraband hospital or military hospital.35 After long work hours, Tubman went home “to her little cabin, and made about fifty pies, a great quantity of ginger-bread, and two casks of root beer.” She then hired a contraband to peddle these through the camps for her.36 The teacher Charlotte Forten recorded her visits with the woman who continued to do such “good brave work,” noting that Tubman kept an “eating house,” probably a kitchen for the needy.37 Also, Tubman used the only military pay she received in Beaufort, two hundred dollars, to establish a “wash-house” where she spent some time teaching “the freed women to do washing to aid in supporting themselves instead of depending wholly on Govt aid.”38
Tubman and Plowden also made occasional purchases outside Beaufort using her military passes. She states going to the Hilton Head commissary to buy supplies.39 Such travel in the islands was common for freedpeople seeking good prices and reinforces other evidence about local trade in goods. The landowner Edward Philbrick complained that shopping for best prices hurt the small proprietary store he had established for his laborers. He imported “vast quantities of articles which they never had in abundance before, such as soap, candles, pots, ovens, knives & forks, pails, brooms, spoons, molasses, coffee, herring, mackeral, bacon, beef &c. &c.,” but the freedmen were not long in finding out where to buy cheapest, traveling to the merchants at Hilton Head.40
Freedpeople adapted quickly to the connection between purchases and wages. Often goods were sold at only a slight margin to encourage acceptance of wage earning. Black workers and soldiers carefully saved their money not only for foodstuffs but land purchase. One witness said that some black soldiers “hoard their money themselves” or set funds aside for their family.41 Some traded in goods, making “a pretty snug little sum, peddling among the soldiers, selling fruit, &c.”42 There were jealousies over the inequality in earnings. Black men working in the Quartermaster Department could earn seven dollars, or more if skilled, while those remaining on the land earned less and were not paid promptly.
Private Webster clearly sold foodstuffs, as several witnesses confirmed making purchases. Walter D. Plowden testified for the prosecution. He lived “across from the Commissary Store House,” and recalled that he purchased one hundred pounds of brown sugar and three or four weeks later paid for another fifty pounds, all in barrels, at about twelve to fourteen cents a pound. In March, Plowden purchased “Coffee, Hardbread, &c.” for about “25 or 26 dollars.” Others made similar purchases. On about March 18, Sumner W. Bennett, proprietor of the Stevens House Hotel, paid nine dollars a barrel for flour, twelve cents a pound for the brown sugar, and eight or nine cents a pound for rice.43
Plowden and Tubman’s attempt to resell these commodities apparently raised the initial suspicions about Webster’s allegedly illicit sales. Shopkeeper John Lilly testified that the pair offered him a quantity of flour and sugar. He refused and then notified Webster of his suspicions that “there was goods taken out of his store which he did not know anything about, and taken to Plowdens.” Lilly stated that sometime later he was talking to Harriet Tubman in his store when Webster walked in. Determined to clarify the situation, he asked Webster “whether she bought the sugar of him or not” and recalled the answer that “She did Sixty pounds of sugar of him.” When customers entered, Webster left but sent for Lilly to come to his office. As Lilly testified,
"He there asked me if I wanted to injure him. I told him no, nor any other white man—He asked me not to say anything about that Sugar. I told him that Plowden and Harriet had gone to Genl. [Rufus] Saxton and if I was called, I should make a clean breast of it. He then said the sugar was got honestly & people might think it was taken from there."44
Interestingly, Lilly’s testimony substantiates the fact that Tubman had access to General Saxton and other officers in the Department of the South.
As the court-martial continued, the judge advocate shifted his questioning to the topic of rations. Did Webster reduce them in order to accumulate surpluses that could be sold? The testimony provides information about the food items and quantities provided in the camp. Lucius Dubson testified that in May 1863 he received rations of pork, coffee, beans, hominy, sugar, and flour. He could not recall if the quantities were reduced but said that he “drew 4 qts of Flour for the 1st ten days in May and 6 quarts for the ten days in June.” He received “Pork and Bacon in the 1st ten days in June and the peice of Bacon was as large as the peice of Pork was in May.” As of June he was receiving more peas but had received no potatoes until the start of June. He did report some fluctuations in quantities, receiving more of some items at the “first issue” of June than at the “last issue” of May. In June he was given more beans, rice, peas, hominy, coffee, flour, meal, and sugar (one-half pint more). The flour amounted to four quarts more, and sugar one pint more.45
The fragmentary camp records for the period April 4, 1862, to February 29, 1864, show wide fluctuations in the numbers of camp residents who received rations. On May 13, 1862, 132 received rations, while 1,096 did so on March 21, 1863. Camp paupers received free, regular rations, as noted in a fragmentary camp list of “Pauper Weekly Rations.” A return from August 11, 1863, to January 21, 1864, lists between 359 and 428 persons receiving rations every ten days.46
Other contrabands provided somewhat conflicting answers to the question of whether they received more or fewer provisions, particularly from May 21 to 31, 1863. Nat Simmons was uncertain because “three of us draw together.” Isaac Blake replied that “I received a very little more rations now, than I ever did get.” Thomas Blake emphatically stated that he now draws rations for ten days but “I don’t get as much as I did from Mr Webster for 7 days.”47 Asked how he knew, he said that on June 1 he received only a cup of rice and hominy, whereas from May 21 to 31 he received a pint of the same.
Testimony from 2nd Lt. W. G. Moon was more incriminating. Moon took an inventory of military stores in his charge on May 25, 1863. After apparently comparing the storehouse inventory with records of disbursements, he found surpluses of fourteen items that included 1,436 pounds of pork, 2,634 pounds of flour, and 102 pounds of beans.48
Finally, Webster replied to the charges in a written statement to the court. First, he wrote that the morning reports issued daily to the quartermaster’s office showed the number of contrabands healthy and working each day and thus able to receive rations. Thus, he argued, “it is easy for him to see if there is more rations drawn than the number of contrabands that have been reported at that office.” Second, that the contrabands can tell if their rations differed, and that the “new administration” issues the same quantities that he did. He admitted selling flour, sugar, and rice to certain parties, but claimed that they were supplies left by other military units and not from stores left under his care. He claimed that when the Twenty-seventh Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers, left Beaufort for Key West, they left in his care about one hundred pounds of sugar and one barrel of flour (to be sold for them with money forwarded). He claimed, also, to sell a barrel of sugar (about 250 pounds) for a Captain Hale and to forward the money. He also claimed to sell a consigned quantity of rice left behind by the Sixth Connecticut Volunteers.49 The testimony of freedmen, white shopkeepers, and officers proved crucial to convict Webster on the illicit sale of army rations. He was not found guilty of reducing rations.
Harriet Tubman’s court-martial testimony and that of others highlight the difficult conditions of contraband camp life. Refugees lived under military control. And the camps were not intended as solutions to the refugee crisis unleashed by military invasion. Government policy sought to keep freedpeople where they were best qualified to support themselves—on the land. The camps were bases of last resort, detrimental to family stability, filled with sickness, poverty, and the crippled, and based on a policy of impermanence. The American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission recommended that the contraband camps be viewed as military villages, “as places of reception and distribution only,” for holding people no longer “than is necessary to dispose of them as military laborers or on plantations, or in self-supporting situations.” Even when women and children supported themselves “by washing or other service for troops in the neighborhood,” camp life was seen as “demoralizing,” and plantation work was viewed as preferable to “mere village employment.”50
The uncertainty of camp life derived from the transience of its residents. Men, both single and married, came from the countryside to seek employment and wages with the Quartermaster Department. Sometimes they returned to their plantations, and black men increasingly joined military units in 1863. Women and their children often left the land for the camps if their conditions were desperate. While they received food there, they found only temporary work, cramped conditions, and the danger of disease. In addition, many cited the proximity to army troops as a harmful influence, especially on women.
This newfound testimony, with its emphasis on rations, suggests the helplessness of camp contrabands, that they could be cheated and manipulated. They were entirely dependent on camp officials for work and rations. The structure of camp administration presented opportunities for corruption. Yet contrabands had some power to be heard. They could testify when abuse was discovered. And, at Beaufort, Harriet Tubman had enough influence to take the matter of officer corruption directly to General Saxton.
We also gain some appreciation of camp life as survival. Residents had to get by on basic wages and rations. Little could be saved. But many learned to deal in goods, to buy and sell in Beaufort and beyond.
Relations with whites could be risky, but as the testimony shows, there were some, like the shopkeeper John Lilly, who had a sense of justice and fairness toward the newly freed people. Other town entrepreneurs hired blacks as domestics, waiters, carpenters, and cooks. They were willing to profit from a wage system based on some measure of equality and fairness between employer and employed.
The testimony takes us to the heart of that transitory experience of liberation during wartime. Freedpeople were learning quickly to adapt and survive. They created their own strategies for survival, as difficult and narrow as the options were. They could remain on the plantation or come to work for the military at Beaufort and Hilton Head. But they learned to save, earn, buy, and trade. The young gained some schooling. A few had an opportunity to gain land and property. While their legal status was still somewhat unclear, there was no going back. They had begun to face the difficult challenges of freedom.
This document also adds some detail to our picture of Harriet Tubman’s activities at Beaufort. We have always known of her efforts as nurse and spy there. Now we gain some new, limited details about her daily life, her interactions with camp residents, town merchants, and the military command. The traffic in foodstuffs and other goods was pervasive, and Tubman, seeking to make ends meet, sought those opportunities.
We sense from the document, particularly in the merchant John Lilly’s reference to “Harriet,” that military officers and merchants accorded her a special degree of respect based on her reputation and dedication at Beaufort. Officers routinely called her “Moses.” Her word was trusted; it had proved invaluable many times before.
Finally, this testimony enriches and reinforces our larger image of Tubman as a tireless, intelligent, and resourceful soldier for freedom and human rights. Her illiteracy did not impede her immersion in and success in the war and reconstruction efforts there. Tubman was both military agent and relief worker. As such, the breadth of her contributions and her successes make her career unique and still fascinating. She fought on all fronts. Best known are her spying and military exploits behind Confederate lines outside Beaufort and in Florida. Liberating slaves called forth her most inspired and dramatic efforts. Just two days before the Webster trial and her testimony, she had returned triumphantly to Beaufort after planning and leading a successful raid with Col. James Montgomery of prime rice plantations along the Combahee River, northeast of Beaufort. Tubman and trusted black scouts had reconnoitered the area, and she helped plan and lead the attack. After gunboats bombarded the plantations, black soldiers destroyed luxurious homes and furnishings, slave quarters, and other buildings, and flooded fields of rice and corn. Tubman later recalled the frantic yet humorous scramble for the boats as women ran with “bags on der shoulders, baskets on der heads, and young ones taggin’ behin’, all loaded; pigs squealin’, chickens screamin’, young ones squallin’.”51 On their return to Beaufort, large crowds gathered along Bay Street and cheered the victorious black soldiers of the Second South Carolina Volunteers and the 727 newly freed contrabands. Tubman then addressed the freedpeople with “sound sense and real native eloquence.”52 She was the only woman to lead men into battle during the Civil War. Tubman’s espionage and military exploits were central parts of her tireless contributions at Beaufort. All her endeavors, including her testimony at the Webster trial, were facets of an intriguing and compelling record. They testify to her forceful presence as a “heroic woman” doing “good brave work” in the sea islands. This testimony identifies yet another element of her impressive contribution at Beaufort and of the life of a remarkable individual.
Benjamin Guterman is an editor with Prologue and NARA's Product Development Staff. He has written a study of colonial New York City artisans and several book reviews in the areas of American labor history and North American trade relations.
Notes
The author thanks Mary Giunta, Burt Knauft, Tom Lowry, Mike Musick, and Reggie Washington for their comments and DeAnne Blanton, Michael Pilgrim, and Phyllis Goodnow for their assistance with materials and resources.
1. Frederick Douglas to Harriet Tubman in Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (1886; reprinted 1993), p. 135.
2. Harriet Tubman’s testimony is found in the proceedings of the court-martial of Pvt. John E. Webster, which is in Civil War Court-Martial File LL566, U.S. v. Private John E. Webster, Co. G, 47th Regiment Penn. Vols., Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army), Record Group (RG) 153, National Archives Building, Washington, DC (NAB).
3. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction (1964), p. 238.
4. Ibid., p. 237.
5. General Order No. 9, Head Quarters, E.C., Feb. 1862, vol. 19, #56, Port Royal Correspondence, 5th Agency, Records of the Civil War Special Agencies of the Treasury Department, RG 366. This document and several others used herein from RG 53 (Records of the Bureau of the Public Debt), RG 366, and RG 393 (Records of United States Continental Commands, 1821–1920) are printed in Ira Berlin et. al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series I, vol. 3, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (1990).
6. Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865 (1973), p. 51.
7. Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman (1943; reprinted 1974), pp. 154–158.
8. Bradford, Harriet Tubman, p. 93.
9. Ibid., 103.
10. The Bell Farm is mentioned in the Beaufort contraband camp ledger as the contraband smallpox hospital. It seems to have been distinct from the contrabands’ town hospital, having “5 Negro Houses” with room for twenty-five to thirty persons. Entry 3119, p. 285, Office of the Superintendent of Contrabands Copybook, Beaufort, SC, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, RG 105, NAB.
11. A letter dated Jan. 7, 1863, orders that the bearer, Harriet Tubman, be issued one hundred dollars “secret service money.” Department of the South, Letters Transmitted, entry 4088, vol. 13, file 1566, Pt. 1, RG 393, NAB.
12. Elizabeth Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands (1893), pp. 31–32. Quoted in James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War (1965), p. 114.
13. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, p. 166.
14. The Department of the South extended from South Carolina through Florida. Testimony of Capt. E. W. Hooper. Plantation laborers who chose to cultivate cotton received twenty-five cents a day plus an extra one-half cent for each pound of cotton picked. Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series), 1861–1870 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M619), roll 200, p. 206, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780’s–1917, RG 94, NAB.
15. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, p. 230.
16. Ibid., p. 60.
17. Bernard K. Lee, Testimony Before the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, 1863–64, M619, roll 200, frame 226.
18. Gen. Rufus Saxton to M. C. Meigs, at Hilton Head, Nov. 9, 1861, in U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880–1901), series I, vol. 6, p. 777.
19. Charlotte Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands,” Atlantic Monthly 18 (May 1864): 587. Quoted in McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War (1965), 114–115.
20. Edward L. Pierce to Hon. Salmon P. Chase, Feb. 3, 1862, vol. 19, #72a, Port Royal Correspondence, 5th Agency, RG 366, NAB. Other contraband camps throughout the South had varying conditions. Some lacked adequate shelters or used tents, while others used deserted houses or old barracks. M619, roll 200, frames 572–577.
21. Capt. Hazard Stevens to the Superintendent of the Dept. of Contrabands, Mar. [28?], 1862, vol. 37/89D 9AC, pp. 53–56, Letters Sent, series 5075, 2nd Brigade, SC Expeditionary Corps, Records of the U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–1920. RG 393, NAB.
22. Beaufort, SC, Contraband Camp ledger, entry 3117, Office of the Superintendent of Contrabands Copybook, Contraband Department Records, 1862, pp. 1–286, RG 105, NAB.
23. Brig. Gen. Isaac I. Stevens to Maj. Gen. Hunter, May 10, 1862, vol. 37/89D 9AC, pp. 159B60, Letters Sent, ser. 5075, 2d Brigade, Northern Dist., Dept. of the South, RG 393, Pt 2, No. 325 [C-1235].
24. M619, roll 199, p. 14. Priv. John E. Webster wrote in his court statement that “the contrabands are divided into different groups; each gang, being in charge of a white man.” Court-Martial File LL566, Document “E,” RG 153, NAB.
25. C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 5 (1992), p. 221.
26. A. S. Hitchcock to Col. Hall, Aug. 25, 1864, H-371 1864, Letters Received, ser. 4109, Dept. of the South, RG 393, NAB. See also M619, roll 200, frame 187.
27. Service record of John E. Webster, 47th Pennsylvania Infantry, RG 94, NAB.
28. Edward L. Pierce to Hon. Salmon P. Chase, Feb. 3, 1862, vol. 19, #72a, Port Royal Correspondence, 5th Agency, RG 366, NAB.
29. Entry 3117, p. 160. Entry 3118, p. 50, RG 105, NAB.
30. Report of Wm. E. Park [Mar. 18, 1862], vol. 19, #116, Port Royal Correspondence, 5th Agency, RG 366, NAB.
31. The testimony appears on M619, Roll 200.
32. Testimony of Harry McMillan (colored), ibid., p. 305.
22. Entry 3119, p. 125, Office of the Superintendent of Contrabands Copybook, Beaufort, SC, Contraband Department Records, 1862, RG 105, NAB. The military also provided those blacks married by custom with civil ceremonies. See Elaine C. Everly, “Marriage Registers of Freedmen,” Prologue: Journal of the National Archives 5 (Fall 1973): 150–154.
34. Charlotte Forten describes her walk through the neighborhood on the southern part of town around General Saxton’s headquarters. She wrote that the former public library was being used as a shelter for contrabands from Fernandina, Florida. The Arsenal, she wrote, “is a fine large stone structure—fine—I sh[ou]ld say for this region. The entrance is guarded by two handsome brass cannon, and a fierce looking sentinel.” Forten, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten (1953; reprinted 1981), p. 181. Tubman had a “little cabin” for a time, as noted in Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman, p. 97.
35. Tubman recalled that “I’d go to de hospital, I would, early eb’ry mornin.” She sponged one injured man after another until the water was warm and “red as clar blood.” Bradford, Harriet Tubman, p. 97. Tubman worked at the contraband hospital under the direction of Henry K. Durrant, acting assistant surgeon, who wrote of “her kindness and attention to the sick and suffering of her own race.” His letter is printed in the same volume on page 139.
37. Charlotte Forten, Journal, p. 180.
38. While Tubman was away on a military expedition in Florida, a regiment appropriated the building and ended the “wash-room.” In a history by Charles P. Wood, HR55A–D1, Accompanying Papers for Harriet Tubman Davis, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, RG 233, NAB.
39. Tubman possessed a military pass signed by Maj. Gen. D. Hunter to travel on any government transport and purchase goods at the commissary, as needed. The pass is in HR55A–D1, Accompanying Papers for Harriet Tubman Davis, RG 233, NAB. Two additional passes can be found in entry 56, RG 107, NAB. At the Beaufort store, goods were “sold to freedpeople at an advance simply sufficient to pay the cost of transportation.” Testimony of Capt. E. W. Hooper, M619, roll 200, p. 238.
40. Freedom: Wartime Genesis, Jan. 14, 1864, p. 280. Also, an “old Quaker gentleman,” with goods supplied by the Port Royal Relief Committee of Philadelphia, maintained a store on St. Helena Island. M619, roll 200, pp. 237–238.
41. M619, roll 200, frame 238.
42. Virginia Matzke Adams, On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldiers Civil War Letters from the Front (1991), p. 27.
43. Walter Plowden was one of Tubman’s trusted scouts (Conrad, Harriet Tubman, p. 166). Court-Martial File LL566, [pp. 9–15,] RG 153, NAB. The Beaufort Contraband Camp records contain a few entries under “Applicants for House Servants” and “Hired Servants.” Town employers made requests with the camp superintendent for workers. On June 13, 1862, Rebecca (former master, Edward Cuthbert) was assigned to Ely and Bennett at the Stevens Hotel. Dick (former master, Croft) was hired by Mr. Pollitzer, baker at Beaufort, on March 31, 1862. Entry 3119, p. 48, RG 105, NAB
44. Lilly testified that the sugar offered him was the same “quality” as that issued to contrabands. Court-Martial File LL566, [p. 26,] RG 153, NAB.
45. This conforms to testimony of Lt. Lawrence Moser of Co. F, 2nd regiment S.C.V., in charge of the Contraband Store House at the commissary before the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission. He reported that “We draw for ten days at a time three times a month. If the month has 31 days the last time we draw for 11 days. We draw on a Consolidated Provision Return.” M619, roll 200, frame 200.
46. Entry 3117, pp. 1–286; entry 3118, pp. 1–286; and entry 3119, p. 54, RG 105, NAB.
47. Testimony of Thomas Blake, Court-Martial Case LL566, [p. 37], RG 153, NAB.
48. Testimony of W. G. Moon, p. 31, ibid.
49. Webster’s statement, labeled document “E,” is contained in the court-martial file, ibid. John Lilly testified that Webster told him that the sugar, beef, pork, and beans he sold were from the Sixth Regiment, Connecticut Volunteers.
50. M619, roll 199, p. 23.
51. Bradford, Harriet Tubman, 101.
52. Quoted in Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, p. 247. Tubman discusses the raid, stating that “we colored people are entitled to some credit for that exploit,” in her letter from Beaufort dated June 30, 1863, in Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 220. See Cpl. James Henry Gooding’s contemporary account of Montgomery’s raid in his letter from Beaufort dated June 8, 1863, in Adams, On the Altar of Freedom, pp. 26–29.