Contraband Camps and the Freedmen's Bureau During the Civil War and Reconstruction (2017-2018)
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Description
Kristin Bouldin grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history and biology at the University of Virginia in 2011 and a master’s degree in history at the University of Mississippi in 2014. Her research interests include emancipation, contrabands and freedmen during the Civil War and Reconstruction, government policies regarding African-Americans during early Reconstruction, and the role of gender in the lives of freedmen. Her dissertation explores how federal policies formulated in wartime contraband camps shaped programs and policies of the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and includes extensive detail about conditions and hardships in the camps. The dissertation aims to address a significant gap in the literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction by connecting contraband camps to the Freedmen’s Bureau. She also regularly attends numerous historical conferences, including the Southern Historical Association, the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, and the Society of Civil War Historians.
This dissertation discusses the connections between policies developed in the contraband camps and the policies enacted by the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction. It argues that that contraband camp policies created several models for Bureau agents to follow, and that Bureau agents failed to learn from the problematic contraband camps and enacted policies and programs that had already failed in the camps. In addition, it argues that the federal government failed to provide effective oversight for the camps, which allow individual camp commanders to institute policies that often undermined the ability of the contrabands to gain economic autonomy, and that poor oversight continued under the Bureau despite a structured bureaucracy. To make these arguments, the dissertation analyzes contraband camps in Virginia, North Carolina, Washington, DC, South Carolina, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and also discusses the Bureau across the South. By including multiple camps, it provides a more complete analysis of connections between the camp and the Bureau and also discusses the specific local circumstances of each camp, such as the legality of slavery in Kentucky or the status of Washington as the national capital. Finally, the dissertation concludes by analyzing the long-term legacies of contraband camp failures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to argue that policies which originated in the contraband camps had consequences that lasted almost a century.
Publication Date
4-15-2018
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Recommended Citation
Bouldin, Kristin, "Contraband Camps and the Freedmen's Bureau During the Civil War and Reconstruction (2017-2018)" (2018). McMinn Fellowship. 8.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mcminn_fellow/8
Comments
Link to dissertation in eGrove