Sacred Space-A Memphis Civil War Contraband Camp
on President’s Island
In the late spring of 1865, my great great grandfather Daniel W. Williams, a soldier in the 63rd United States Colored Troops (USCT), was detailed by the Commander-at-Memphis Gen. Cadwallader C. Washburn. I concluded, after years of searching for the orders attached to the detail, that Grandfather Daniel and a half dozen others in the regiment, were re-organizing a community of freedpeople at President’s Island in the Mississippi River.
Although the island camp is only vaguely remembered today and not designated with an historic marker, it was during the Civil War one of the most critical operations in southwest Tennessee. Created by Col. John Eaton, Jr., General Superintendent of Freedmen, President’s Island was the base of operations for Eaton’s Freedmen’s Department.
The ad hoc agency employed migrating blacks or “contrabands,” a term deplored by President Lincoln but strategic in the war campaign, as woodchoppers and cooks. By the time the department would be in full swing, blacks would work also as teamsters and laundresses and as cooks for Union officers.
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Commander of the Department of the Tennessee and the person most responsible for Eaton’s appointment, is known to have suggested that contraband camps be placed on islands in the Mississippi. While President’s Island has remained in the shadow of Island № 10 in Missouri and of the camp (a set of plantations) at Davis Bend, Miss., President’s Island was the center of all that Eaton and his collaborators hoped their social and economic project would achieve.
Camp Missionary Lucinda Humphrey Hays, cousin to the anti-slavery activist John Brown, locates the island camp relative to two others within the city. Writing in the spring of ’63, she explained,
A deep ravine south of the city separates the fort from Camp Shiloh, and another ravine just below separates Shiloh from Camp Fiske. These are on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi, and opposite-a little south of this-is camp Dixie on the President’s island...The camp on the island at present consists of tents.
The President Island camp was perhaps the third or fourth to be organized in the city. Humphrey Hays recalls coming to the island at the advice of Chaplain Asa Severance Fiske, Post Superintendent of Camp Fiske, and of two other missionaries. Humphrey Hays wrote Corresponding Secretary of the American Missionary Association John Whipple a couple weeks after coming to Camp Dixie.
We found about a thousand of the ‘Freedpeople’ gathered in tents, a great many without much clothing or cooking utensils, and suffering from various diseases. More destitute and suffering people are coming every day.
Death was a constant.
In a letter of July 1, 1863, Humphrey Hays informed Whipple that since Camp Dixie had been opened — May 20th — about a hundred blacks had been buried, as well as the camp’s white “commandant,” Mr. Barnes. Quite possibly, the bodies remain there today, their location indicated by officials besides Humphrey Hay, for instance, by Col. John Phillips, appointed in 1864 Superintendent of Freedmen for West Tennessee.
In a letter in the spring of 1864, Col. Phillips requested use of land adjacent to Camp Shiloh for agricultural purposes. Phillips describes the desired site in relation to “the Contraband Hospital on the East,” “the Mississippi River on the West,” “the Contraband burying ground on the North,” and “the soldier’s graveyard on the South.”
Taking together these descriptions provided by Humphrey Hays and Phillips, we can surmise that the referenced contraband burying ground south of what was once Fort Pickering — today the site of the Ornamental Metal Museum —was located perhaps in the middle of the land south of the ravine.
It would appear, however, that there was more than one burial ground— one at Camp Shiloh and another at Camp Dixie in addition to other sites created in the postwar period. Charlotte Cole, widow of Jefferson Cole, another member of the 63rd, testified in her Widow’s Pension application about the death of her husband’s first wife, Louisa “Lue” Cole. Claiborne Graves, who testified in 1919 that he had lived on President’s Island fifty-one years, corroborated Charlotte’s statement, remembering that Lue, having died in the latter part of the year, was buried at Lake Field Cemetery. According to Charlotte’s application, her husband too died on the island, Sept. 22, 1912.
I saw the dead body of…Lue Cole; she was buried in Lake Field Grave Yard on President Island. I was living on Little Island near President Island, when Lue died. My husband, Andrew White, was then dead.
While both Jeff and Lue Cole died on the Island, Charlotte Cole’s first husband died not on the island but near Memphis.
One should note that Charlotte names the postwar burial ground as Lake Field and, in so doing, provides not a small piece of information. She implies that there was a cemetery near a lake within the bounds of the island.
Years earlier, when Jefferson was still alive, he himself testified in the Widow’s application for the wife of a fellow soldier, Ben K. Jackson. That soldier’s spouse, Vinie, had died in the contraband camp sometime in 1863 before Company B of the 63rd was organized. Jefferson stated that he used to visit the house where Vinie died, a memory that complicates earlier descriptions of blacks in tents at that point.
There are countless others buried on the island, countless because if their names were ever recorded no one today can say where the document is housed. And that the persons buried on the island included soldiers there is no doubt. Peter Shivers, a corporal of the 63rd, died not long after returning to Memphis after his unit’s mustering out at Duvall’s Bluff, Ark. While his wife Louisa Malone, formerly Shivers, remembers Peter’s death taking place at the end of February 1866, some place it in January. According to Louisa, Peter came “home” to her on the island, where she had been living.
At least two of Company K of the 63rd, Daniel Williams’s company, died of drowning, in the Mississippi River, for while the island is not land locked today and easy to reach, it was no so easy to reach in the nineteenth century. If the victims of makeshift watercraft or of attempts to swim the distance between the bluff and the island are not buried on President’s Island, they are likely to be found in the soldier’s graveyard. Williams’s wife Nancy, my second great grandmother, too died in camp, leaving her husband and four of their children there. Having lived at a second Shiloh Camp, her resting place may be at the burial ground referred to by Col. Phillips.
An Island of Their Own
Long before being mustered out and through all of the chaos of war, the men of the 63rd and their families had come to think of President’s Island as their home. It was there that many of them had first arrived after having made their way to Memphis. Their families, including their women and children, worked there in the earliest days. The soldiers had come to know each other months before enlistment, and they had no doubt helped each other build structures in which they could begin their lives as freedpeople.
In their pension applications years after the war, many soldiers of the 63rd and other units such as the 55th — formed at Corinth, Miss. — referred to their homes on President’s Island, meaning their houses. Quite possibly, the building of a semi-permanent community had begun before these troops were mustered out. It is very clear that many of the troops, away from Memphis at least part of 1865, quite intentionally returned to the island to be with family and friends.
Samuel Williams, Grandfather Daniel and Grandmother Nancy’s oldest son, was but a boy of twelve in 1864, when his name — along with that of his mother and three of his siblings, Robert, Walker, and Mary — were recorded in a camp register. In that year, they were living at Shiloh Camp, consolidated from an earlier camp of the same name and Camp Holly Springs. When Humphrey Hays in November of 1862 makes her first reference to Shiloh, which she then spells Shiloah, she describes it as “a contraband village containing upwards to two thousand inhabitants.” It is not clear where this early camp was located; however, it would not seem to have been in Memphis as the originator of the Memphis camps, Eaton, was then north of the city, at Grand Junction, Tenn.
After the mustering out, Grandfather Daniel and his fellows apparently moved their families from Shiloh, referred to by some as a regimental village, to the island. While other soldiers, in turn, would later leave their President’s Island home, when, as one member put it, “the camp broke up,” plenty of others chose to cast their lot there. Historian Jim Downs has suggested that Eaton’s goals for development of Negro agriculture were not realized, and the Superintendent himself also expressed a note of doubt in his 1864 Report in which he stated,
This Supervision hoped to see a large number of negro planters using their own capital, or aided by benevolence or by the Government… President’s Island, below Memphis, originally occupied at the suggestion of Gen. Grant., and by General Hurlbut’s order, was taken away from our control, and public interest sacrificed to private.
However, by the start of 1865, Eaton was again somewhat upbeat concerning the prospects of black farming on the island. He added to his report that General Dana, under a new order, had once again opened an opportunity for farming.
And farm these African American soldiers and their families did. In 1870, dozens of black families were making a go of it. Five years after the war, the families had amassed enough capital to make independent farming a reality and Col. Eaton’s report veritable. Eaton wrote,
To sum up the conditions of the Negro as represented by my officers, it should be said that of all the elements represented in the Valley, the independent Negro cultivator was without doubt the most successful.
In 1870, Grandfather Daniel, with a new wife, Ellen Woods Williams, was farming ten acres valued at five hundred dollars while Jefferson Cole, still very much alive, was farming six valued at three hundred dollars. These two families, among others, also owned livestock and had gathered enough grain to keep their animals and feed their families. Both families had fifty dollars in livestock, which probably meant one or two mules for plowing.
Most of the families who farmed on the island would remain there through 1880, at which point some, though not all, of them began moving beyond this early home in freedom and, in many cases, beyond the city. Some moved down into Mississippi, finding opportunities there for more land while others crossed the river into Crittenden and St. Francis counties in Arkansas. Still others sought to greatly increase their prospects by migrating to the Oklahoma Territory. Sadly, Ben K Jackson of Company B — who, according to his wife Susan bore on his face wounds of slavery — headed to Oklahoma with a plan to buy land and then send for his wife. Ben K made it to Guthrie, Okla. in the winter of 1891–2 but after a week there somewhat mysteriously took ill and died. It was a sad death that did not afford him time to write Susan of his travails, and yet their dream was no doubt partly born during their time in Memphis. While Ben K’s burial place will probably never be known, those of hundreds of other blacks who lived on the island between five to fifty years can easily be found. That they are hidden in plain sight is a simple fact. The evidence of their lives in Memphis abounds, so much so that the space should be designated as sacred and made accessible. Activism around recovery of all of these wartime burial places would achieve I think a degree of historical justice.
