Fri Jan 14, 2011 7:11 am
On contrabands in the navy:
Blacks were actually pretty commonly employees on the docks and on ships in the south before the Civil War. Frederick Douglass worked on the Baltimore docks while he was still a slave. It was not uncommon to encounter blacks as crewmen on merchant ships and even naval vessals. Sometimes, they even rose to noncommissioned rank - carpenters, boatswains, and suchlike. Robert Smalls was a harbor pilot in Charleston, South Carolina before the war and when the Union Navy blockaded his port, he stole his pilot boat and took it out to the Yankees. They put him to work and he later became the first black commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy.
So there wouldn't be a negative reaction in northern port cities to the use of contrabands in the navy. I would say Union-controlled areas where there were lots of slaves (southern Maryland, central and western Kentucky, central Missouri) would suffer a decrease in pro-Union sympathies as a result: the Union officers were not too particular about where the "contrabands" had run from, while the most pro-Union slaves would be leaving the area and joining the army.
The units should appear with the Union armies that are closest to large concentrations of slaves. One should definitely appear at Fort Monroe.
Maybe the Confederates could also raise black labor units. This would cost some loyalty in the regions where they were raised. They used a lot of black laborers to build the fortified lines around Richmond, Atlanta, and so on.
Stewart King
"There is no substitute for victory"
Depends on how you define victory.
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