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

The Dream Fades

When the Confederates in the spring of 1864 managed to recapture Plymouth nearby along the Roanoke River, a new influx of freed blacks arrived on Roanoke Island. The colony’s population swelled to more than 3,500 people, and the lack of sufficient housing and sanitary conditions for them all began a downward slide from which the Freedmen’s Colony was unable to recover.

Relations between the occupying military forces and the freed families were always strained at best. As the war dragged on, the island troops began taking advantage of the colonists, even apprehending their rations. The blacks in the volunteer troops complained that not only were they not paid often, if at all, but their families on the island had begun suffering as well. The superintendent in charge of the colony in 1865 turned out to be corrupt and was discharged. Meanwhile, the fishing and grape seasons had not fared well for the islanders, making them even needier.

In April of 1865, Horace James appealed personally and unsuccessfully to President Andrew Johnson to address the mistreatment and injustices prevalent among the freedmen’s camps throughout the South. About a month later, President Johnson issued his Amnesty Proclamation that ordered all property seized by the Union forces during the war be returned to owners who could prove title to it. That forecast the end of the Roanoke Island colony and others following its model. Many returned to regions they had escaped as the war broke out and found work as farmers, tradespeople and sharecroppers. Others stayed to work on Roanoke Island and Hatteras communities.

In 1868, Patricia Click reports, 11 former colonists bought 200 acres from local families on the west side of Roanoke Island near where the colony had been. In 1870, the census counted 300 blacks in 60 households. Despite archaeological research conducted on the north end of the island in the 1980s and early 1990s, there is no trace remaining of the colony itself.

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