Black Labor, Contrabands and the U.S. Military Railroads in the Civil War
Black Labor, Contrabands, and Enslaved Timeline and Map
Keywords
- Category: Language Analysis and Visualizations
- Topic: Slavery
- Topic: War
- Topic: African American
- Topic: Emancipation
Related Documents
- Request for passes for African American railroad workers
- Contrabands at Cumberland Landing, Virginia, May 1862
- Testimony of Major Erasmus L. Wentz, Superintendent of Norfolk and Petersburg R.R
- Barricades at Alexandria, Virginia.
- Letter from E. L. Wentz to Daniel Craig McCallum, October 13, 1862
- Letter from W. W. McCafferty to F. P. Lord, November 19, 1863
- African American Laborers on the U.S. Military Railroad in Northern Virginia, c. 1862 or 1863
When Union forces came into the South during the Civil War, enslaved African Americans made immediate movements to make contact with them and escape slavery. Much of this movement took place along the railroads, as blacks joined the U.S.M.R.R. Construction Corps, gathered at depots to sign up for the U.S.C.T., and abandoned their forced labor on Confederate railroad projects. Approximately 135 events concerning black labor on the railroads were recorded or mentioned in the 128-volume digitized Official Records of the Civil War. The highest concentration occurred in Tennessee and Virginia, where black railroad labor became especially significant, but touched nearly every state in the Confederacy.
This image was generated usingSimile (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) Timeline and Map, developed at MIT Media Lab, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License.
