False Freedom: Union Paternalistic Attitudes in Nashville’s Contraband Camps during the Civil War

            As Union forces continued to secure victories in the Western Theatre of the American Civil War and reclaim, by force, the seceded lands of the Confederacy, one question persisted, particularly in Tennessee: what was to be done with the liberated slaves? Slaves would not be formally freed in Tennessee until the Battle of Nashville in 1864, and even then, the integration of freedmen into the rebuilding South proved to be a daunting task. Most prominent and immediate movement towards that end was the development of contraband camps -- so named because slaves were still considered by the Union to be “contraband” confiscated from the South during the war. However, with the chronic underfunding and lack of care put into these camps, the contraband slaves in Tennessee suffered an existence so miserable at the refugee encampments that freedmen were little better off with the Union forces than they were in Southern plantations. This paper seeks to show how, although the Union’s treatment of the freedmen was marginally better than that of the Southern plantation owners, their failures to adequately provide blacks in contraband camps with the necessary help to integrate them into American society was directly responsible for the asymmetric development of black and white communities in Tennessee.