was issued a
specific regulation placing the contraband sick in charge of the army
surgeons.[22] What the situation in the Mississippi Valley was during
these months has been well described by an observer, saying: "I hope I may
never be called on again to witness the horrible scenes I saw in those
first days of history of the freedmen in the Mississippi Valley.
Assistants were hard to find, especially the kind that would do any good
in the camps. A detailed soldier in each camp of a thousand people was the
best that could be done and his duties were so onerous that he ended by
doing nothing. In reviewing the condition of the people at that time, I am
not surprised at the marvelous stories told by visitors who caught an
occasional glimpse of the misery and wretchedness in these camps. Our
efforts to do anything for these people, as they herded together in
masses, when founded on any expectation that they would help themselves,
often failed; they had become so completely broken down in spirit, through
suffering, that it was almost impossible to arouse them."[23]

A few sympathetic officers and especially the chaplains undertook to
relieve the urgent cases of distress. They could do little, however, to
handle all the problems of the unusual situation until they engaged the
attention of the higher officers of the army and the federal functionaries
in Washington. After some delay this was finally done and special officers
were detailed to take charge of the contrabands. The Negroes were
assembled in camps and employed according to instructions from the
Secretary of War as teamsters, laborers and the like on forts and
railroads. Some were put to picking, ginning, baling and removing cotton
on plantations abandoned by their masters. General Grant, as early as
1862, was making further use of them as fatigue men in the department of
the surgeon-general, the quartermaster and the commissary. He believed
then that such Negroes as did well in these more humble positions should
be made citizens and soldiers.[24] As a matter of fact out of this very
suggestion came the policy of arming the Negroes, the first regiment of
whom was recruited under orders issued by General Hunter at Port Royal,
South Carolina in 1862. As the arming of the slave to participate in this
war did not generally please the white people who considered the struggle
a war between civilized groups, this policy could not offer general relief
to the congested contraba