Paths to Freedom: An Archaeologist's Civil War Field Notes

Field Notes of Dr. Marisol Vega, Archaeologist

1Stop 1: Fort Monroe, Hampton, Virginia. This stone fort stayed in Union hands for the whole war, although it stood in Confederate Virginia. On the night of May 23, 1861, three enslaved men, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend, rowed across the water to the fort. They had been forced to build Confederate defenses nearby. The next day a Confederate officer came under a flag of truce to demand their return. The Union commander, General Benjamin Butler, refused. Because the men had been used to help the enemy's army, he said, he would keep them as "contraband of war." Within weeks hundreds more people escaped to the fort, and thousands followed. Today I mapped the area where many of them built a settlement outside the fort.

2Stop 2: Vicksburg National Military Park, Mississippi. Here the Union gunboat USS Cairo rests under a shelter, its timbers and iron armor raised from the Yazoo River in the 1960s. Gunboats like Cairo helped carry out a Union plan to control the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy in two. On December 12, 1862, two underwater mines exploded under Cairo, and it sank in about 12 minutes; its whole crew escaped. Vicksburg, on high bluffs above the river, held out until General Ulysses S. Grant's siege forced it to surrender on July 4, 1863. Days later the last Confederate fort on the river, at Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrendered too.

3Stop 3: Camp Nelson, Kentucky. Kentucky stayed in the Union and kept slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, applied only to areas in rebellion against the United States. In 1864 the army began enlisting enslaved Kentucky men, and those who joined gained their freedom. Thousands came to Camp Nelson to enlist, many with their wives and children. In November 1864 the army forced about 400 women and children out of the camp in freezing weather, and many became sick and died. After a public outcry, the army built a Home for Colored Refugees here. In March 1865 Congress passed a law freeing the wives and children of Black Union soldiers. Slavery in Kentucky ended for everyone else only when the 13th Amendment took effect in December 1865. Today our team logged buttons, broken dishes and a thimble near the site of the refugee home.

4Stop 4: Appomattox Court House, Virginia. In early April 1865, after Grant's armies broke through near Petersburg, General Robert E. Lee's hungry army retreated west. On April 9, Lee surrendered to Grant in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house. Grant let Lee's soldiers go home, allowed those who owned horses or mules to keep them, and sent food to the Confederates. The final copy of the surrender terms was written out by Grant's military secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Ely S. Parker, a Seneca. Parker's nation, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, and other Haudenosaunee nations govern themselves today. The house in front of me is a rebuilding: the original was taken apart in 1893, and the National Park Service rebuilt it in the 1940s on its old foundations, using archaeology and old photographs.