The Corinth Contraband Camp

One of the stops in the National Park Service's guide "What is There to See in Corinth, Mississippi?" — at 800 N. Parkway Street, open daily from sunrise to sunset.

Seeking freedom behind Union lines

From the start of the Union occupation of Corinth, Mississippi, "contrabands" — people who had escaped slavery — made their way to the city. Many found work in the army camps as cooks, servants and laundry workers and found lodging where they could, living a precarious life, neither fully free nor fully enslaved.

At first only a trickle reached U.S. Army lines. After President Abraham Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, the trickle became a flood.

A model camp

Brig. Gen. Grenville M. Dodge, commanding the Corinth garrison, understood how much the Confederacy depended on Black labour and how their leaving would hurt the Southern war effort. He welcomed freedom seekers into Union lines and set aside a camp for them east of town, with Chaplain James M. Alexander of the 66th Illinois Infantry as superintendent.

The camp became a model of efficiency, growing into a small town with:

• a church, commissary and hospital;
• frame and log houses on a street grid with named streets and numbered houses;
• a school, staffed by the American Missionary Association, teaching children by day and adults by night.

Four hundred acres of farmland were ploughed — one hundred in vegetables and three hundred in cotton. The produce was sold to the government, and every worker was paid wages. At its height, the camp housed more than 6,000 people.

Soldiers

Dodge also trained and armed a company of Black men to guard the camp — the beginning of what became the 1st Alabama Infantry of African Descent, later the 55th United States Colored Infantry.

The end of the camp

The camp closed in January 1864. Corinth was no longer the strategic hub it had been, the troops were needed elsewhere, and the camp could not survive without the army's protection. Its residents were sent by train to camps near Memphis.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Corinth Contraband Camp," from the series "What is There to See in Corinth, Mississippi?" https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/corinth-contraband-camp-poi.htm
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.