The Home Front
While many Black residents had enlisted in USCT units, for those on the home front, the war provided new opportunities for work, as well as new tension with their white neighbors. Some Ohioans viewed Black workers as a threat to a white workforce. Almyra Brown lived in Albany during the Civil War. Her sons enlisted as Union soldiers, and Milton Holland, a Black man whose slaveholder father had sent him to the Manual Labor Academy, worked for Almyra’s uncle Nelson Van Vorhes until he was able to enlist in a Black regiment in 1863.[1] In an 1863 letter to her son Edwin, she complained about the Black workers and contrabands:
no help as there is no white men to hire and the niggers all skedadeled when they heard [Confederate soldier] Morgan was comeing, all holed up and have not dared to show their woolly heads till yesterday […] there was a few contrabands went that came in since you left, darn their black faces I hate them, they are no better to go and fight and be shot at than my boys and outher white boys and it makes me mad to see one of them especially to come and want to hire and ask 150 to 200 a day […][2]
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Almyra’s letter reflects a response that was present across the region. There was widespread fear that the Black population would increase and take away jobs from white people. A report of Athens County’s activities lamented that Athens residents “have negroes employed at this time to fill the places occupied heretofore by white men. What a congratulation to the heart of the brave soldier, who returns to his home, and finds his former place of labor occupied by negroes, and his old settlement filled with black trash!”[3] Despite the hostility brewing among local whites, Black workers were able to break into the local workforce in ways that they could not before the war, and this provided them with a new level of social mobility.
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"Contrabands coming into our lines under the proclamation." Harper's Weekly, May 9, 1863. Princeton University Digital Library.
Similarly, the McArthur Democrat charged the Athens Messenger’s reporting, which it viewed as abolitionist, with driving Albany’s Black residents to McArthur.[4] The influx of new Black residents, who were often willing to work for lower wages than white laborers, posed a threat to the local economy in the eyes of many white residents. Still, the population shift in the war allowed Black workers to find opportunities that had been mostly closed off to them before the war.
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Notes
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1. Nelson Van Vorhes, Letter to Austin Brown, December 14, 1861. Brown Family Collection, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University. https://media.library.ohio.edu/digital/collection/p15808coll6/id/556.
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2. Almyra Brown, Letter to Edwin Brown, 1863. Brown Family Collection, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University. https://media.library.ohio.edu/digital/collection/p15808coll6/id/1533/rec/1.
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3. Marietta (Ohio) Republican, “First Fruits of Africanizing Ohio,” Hocking Sentinel, July 17, 1862.
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4. Athens Messenger, February 20, 1862.
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Image: Thomas Nast, “Contrabands coming into our lines under the proclamation,” New York: Harper’s Weekly, May 9, 1863. Princeton University. Library. Graphic Arts Collection. GA 2008.01257. http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/vx021f248
