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The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony
By Michael E.C. Gery

Safe Haven

As the Civil War became inevitable, the Confederate military put slaves and free blacks to work building fortifications and protecting ports and waterways along the Southern coast. Many of the coastal area slaves were skilled as boatmen, fishermen, builders and artisans by that time. In the war’s early stages, Union forces systematically seized Confederate coastal strongholds and in August 1861 occupied Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks with very little resistance. In her thorough history of the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, Patricia C. Click writes that two of the slaves, Ben Tillett and Thomas Robinson, who had helped build forts on Roanoke Island then escaped to Hatteras when it fell into Union hands, assisted Union commanders in their invasion of nearby Roanoke Island, a crucial gateway for shipping and naval fleets. In February 1862, the Union Army under Gen. Ambrose Burnside defeated the Confederate forces on Roanoke Island and immediately occupied their forts and set up camp.

It wasn’t long after the fall of Roanoke Island that word spread among mainland slaves that “if you can cross the creek to Roanoke Island, you will find safe haven.” And so they did. A month after the Union occupation, the army had organized a system for handling the fugitive slaves, who had streamed onto the island and took up residence in the abandoned Confederate barracks and outbuildings. Union leaders considered them “contraband” of war, and felt no obligation to return them to their former owners.The commander on the island, Col. Rush Hawkins, aimed to keep the contraband families together, to employ the adults who could work and pay them wages and rations. Gen. Burnside soon turned over the supervision of blacks in eastern North Carolina to U.S. government authorities.

Once Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves freed in January 1863, their movement to sanctuaries such as Roanoke Island intensified. In April, an Army chaplain from Massachusetts, the Rev. Horace James, who earlier had served with the regiment that seized Roanoke Island, was named “Superintendent of All Blacks in North Carolina” and was ordered to organize “a colony of Negroes” on the island. Simultaneously, the Union Army began recruiting and enlisting newly freed black men and formed the first company of the North Carolina Colored Volunteers.

As the younger men left with the army, the Roanoke Island camp evolved into a sanctuary for their families. The local commanding officer at the time, Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild, ordered the occupation of abandoned and undeveloped land in the vicinity of the military facilities as the site of an ambitious, planned colony. Horace James in early 1864 submitted a plan that showed 26 streets crossed by three “avenues” 50 feet wide. Families were assigned lots of about an acre, and they began building houses and gardens.

Northern Christian missionaries and anti-slavery advocates became involved in the development of new black communities soon after the Emancipation Proclamation. Horace James was well connected to the New England missionary societies and welcomed help from those willing to serve as teachers on Roanoke Island. Eventually, seven teachers worked there. Schools were primitive, but effective, given that few of the colonists could read or write.

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