olk, where General Butler
was the first to establish a "contraband" camp, in North Carolina, and
on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, which had
been seized by the Federal fleet early in the war. To the Sea Islands
also were sent, in 1865, the hordes of Negroes who had followed General
Sherman out of Georgia and South Carolina. Through the border states
from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and along both sides of the
Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, there were other
refugee camps, farms, and colonies. For periods varying from one to four
years these free Negroes had been at work, often amid conditions highly
unfavorable to health, under the supervision of officers of the Treasury
Department or of the army.

Emancipation was therefore a gradual process, and most of the Negroes,
through their widening experience on the plantations, with the armies,
and in the colonies, were better fitted for freedom in 1865 than they
had been in 1861. Even their years of bondage had done something
for them, for they knew how to work and they had adopted in part the
language, habits, religion, and morals of the whites. But slavery had
not made them thrifty, self-reliant, or educated. Frederick Douglass
said of the Negro at the end of his servitude: "He had none of the
conditions of self-preservation or self-protection. He was free from the
individual master, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet.
He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave
to the rains of summer and to the frosts of winter. He was turned loose,
naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky." To prove that he was free
the Negro thought he must leave his old master, change his name, quit
work for a time, perhaps get a new wife, and hang around the Federal
soldiers in camp or garrison, or go to the towns where the Freedmen's
Bureau was in process of organization. To the Negroes who remained at
home--and, curiously enough, for a time at least many did so--the news
of freedom was made known somewhat ceremonially by the master or his
representative. The Negroes were summoned to the "big house," told that
they were free, and advised to stay on for a share of the crop. The
description by Mrs. Clayton, the wife of a Southern general, will
serve for many: "My husband said, 'I think it best for me to inform our
Negroes of their freedom.' So he ordered all the grown slaves to come to
him, and told them t