Strayhorn: Formerly enslaved formed new communities

As Union troops began overrunning coastal North Carolina in the fall of 1861, the formerly enslaved people they were helping to free began seeking refuge in a variety of new communities.

Their individual journeys to freedom would leave a legacy that’s still felt today, according to Dr. Joshua Strayhorn, a research fellow with the U.S. National Park Service. Strayhorn, a New Bern native, was the guest lecturer at Museum of the Albemarle’s “History for Lunch” program last week.

Strayhorn said his research brought him to Elizabeth City to investigate the connections between the growing population of formerly enslaved people in the area during the early years of the Civil War and the roots of that growth at the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island.

Strayhorn said the formerly enslaved’s search for freedom and community began with the defeat of the Confederate Army in the region at the hands of Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside. As the Confederate forces fell, formerly enslaved people started fleeing plantations and farms in droves. Their growing numbers raised a vexing question for the occupying Union Army: What do with these thousands of men, women and children who had formerly lived in bondage?

More than six settlements for freed people were established the state, but Strayhorn’s talk focused on two of them: Roanoke Island and one near New Bern called the Trent River Settlement. Horace James, a Massachusetts chaplain, became the official “Superintendent of Negroes,” and would work to create the settlements, Strayhorn said.

“He thought there were ways to usher in freedom for African Americans,” Strayhorn said.

But James and Union Army leaders did not take into account the coastal life of the region when planning the settlements. They sought to make farmers out of watermen, uprooting men whose lives had been tied to the region’s waterways.

As a result, the Roanoke Island Settlement failed and, “a lot of people returned to fishing, tenant farming, and other maritime industries," Strayhorn said.

The Trent River Settlement near New Bern, however, was more successful. Trent River, which would later be renamed James City, would grow into a community of former enslaved people long after the Civil War had ended.

Strayhorn said that because of the growth of commercial fishing and the coming of the railroad, James City became a thriving community, one that set up its own system of self-government.

However, once the post-war federal oversight of the South ended with the end of Reconstruction, local white elites would begin returning the lands used for the settlement to their original white owners.

Despite this transition back to white political and economic control, many of the formerly enslaved would choose to stay on in the region and either become sharecroppers or work as fishermen, Strayhorn said.

The people of the James City settlement worked to be seen as “good citizens” and form a viable “society” he said. They also came together to buy land in effort to continue the life they were building near New Bern.

Many others, however, began to migrate out of the South, and in some cases, out of the country.

Advertisements for Kansas circulated throughout the Southern states, encouraging former enslaved people to relocate to the Midwest. Many other former slaves began considering what life in Liberia — a West African nation colonized by former slaves — might be like for them.

Strayhorn said freedmen who left northeastern North Carolina for Liberia encouraged others in the region to migrate as well.

“They believed there would be a level of freedom there,” he said.

The formerly enslaved had good reason to wonder about freedom in Liberia and elsewhere. Despite emancipation after the Civil War, African Americans started losing freedoms once federal troops withdrew from the South in the 1870s.

One place many decided to go was the Midwest. More than 40,000 formerly enslaved people would leave the South for Kansas and the Midwest during what became known as the “Kansas Fever Exodus” in 1879.

Meanwhile, the people who chose to stay in James City would struggle to stay on the land they had either been given or had purchased after the war. Strayhorn says his research into the lives of the formerly enslaved shows a diversity of ways they fought to forge new lives in freedom.

“There was no way for African Americans to live their life of freedom,” he said. “There was no one story.”

Strayhorn plans to continue his research into the post-Civil War lives of the formerly enslaved in Elizabeth City area, particularly the Maroon people, the former slaves who created free communities deep in the Great Dismal Swamp. Strayhorn is currently writing a book about his research.