Chronological History of the American Civil War

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brilliant service, losing 35 killed and 40 wounded. At Missionary Ridge it fought in reserve, and then fell slowly back to Dalton, where it wintered. On the Atlanta campaign, beginning in May 1864, it fought at Resaca, Dallas, Kenesaw, Dead Angle, Peach Tree Creek and at Atlanta, where it lost many officers and was in numerous skirmishes. It participated in the engagements at Jonesboro, Lovejoy, Dalton and Decatur, without serious loss; and at bloody Franklin fought with great fierceness, sustaining a loss of one-fourth its men, and at Nashville suffered much amid gallant action before an overwhelming force. As Company E of the First Consolidated Tennessee Regiment, the Ninth marched to North Carolina, where April 26, 1865, it surrendered with forty men. “Contraband Camps” during the Civil War During the Civil War many of Tennessee's 275,000 slaves abandoned farms and towns in anticipation of the approach of the Union army. In the summer of 1862, as the army of General Ulysses S. Grant entered the heavily slaveholding territory of West Tennessee, hordes of

hungry and poorly clad fugitive slaves surrounded the Yankees. Grant ordered Chaplain John Eaton, Jr. (pictured) to requisition surplus tents, blankets, rations, and tools and establish a camp for the fugitives, who had been supplying forced labor for the Confederate army as teamsters, construction laborers, and body servants. As property, the African Americans were considered contraband under the Confiscation Act--thus the name contraband camps. Eaton established the first contraband camp at Grand Junction in August 1862. By March 1863, the contrabands at Grand Junction numbered 1,713.

Two years later, contraband camps stretched throughout the occupied parts of the Mississippi Valley. In late 1862, northern missionaries and church leaders had arrived to establish schools, administer religious and medical services, and even provide political education for contrabands. The army put the able freedmen to work at fifty cents per day on abandoned farms, government-supervised plantations, and military projects. By 1866, Tennessee had contraband camps in each of the three grand divisions. The largest camps were in the urban areas: Memphis had four and Nashville three; there were camps in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Hendersonville, and Clarksville, as well as in smaller towns such as Grand Junction, Bolivar, Pulaski, Jackson, LaGrange, and Somerville. Large settlements of contrabands also existed in Chelsea (East Memphis) and Brentwood (Williamson County). Approximately 20,000 male contrabands were inducted into the Union army as U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). By 1866, USCT regiments comprised 40 percent of the Union army troops raised in Tennessee. Some 31,000 white Tennesseans served in the Union Army of Tennessee, while an estimated 115,000 served in the Confederate forces. The manpower provided by African American troops and the contraband camps gave the Union a decided edge to sustain the occupation in Tennessee and win the war in the western theater. The contraband camps became the foundation for postwar African American neighborhoods and for the institutionalization of African American society in Tennessee. These camps facilitated the process that produced the rapid urbanization of the former slaves, most of whom had lived in rural areas. Fugitive slaves from the Arkansas delta, western Kentucky, northern Mississippi, and rural West Tennessee flowed into Memphis until freedmen outnumbered whites in 1865. Missionaries, Freedmen's Bureau agents, and ministers performed and recorded the first legal marriages for thousands of former slaves in these camps. Filled with log cabins, frame buildings, and often tents with dirt floors, the camps became so large and filled with blacks that northern missionaries and local newspapers often named them "New Africa." The large camps on Memphis's southern boundary were called Camp Shiloh and Camp Fiske (near Union Fort Pickering) and Camp Dixie (President's Island). Camp Shiloh had over three hundred houses and 2,000 residents, as well as churches, schools, saloons, lunchrooms, and barbershops. The contrabands in Camp Dixie cultivated three hundred acres of cotton and built a sawmill and a school in 1863. Many of the