Most of these war-emancipated Negroes were scattered along the borders of the
Confederacy, in camps, in colonies, in the towns, on refugee farms, at work
with the armies, or serving as soldiers in the ranks. There were large working
colonies along the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Florida. The chief centers
were near Norfolk, where General Butler was the first to establish a
"contraband" camp, in North Carolina, and on the Sea Islands of South
Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, which had been seized by the Federal fleet
early in the war. To the Sea Islands also were sent, in 1865, the hordes of
Negroes who had followed General Sherman out of Georgia and South Carolina.
Through the border states from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and along both
sides of the Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, there were
other refugee camps, farms, and colonies. For periods varying from one to four
years these free Negroes had been at work, often amid conditions highly
unfavorable to health, under the supervision of officers of the Treasury
Department or of the army.

Emancipation was therefore a gradual process, and most of the Negroes, through
their widening experience on the plantations, with the armies, and in the
colonies, were better fitted for freedom in 1865 than they had been in 1861.
Even their years of bondage had done something for them, for they knew how to
work and they had adopted in part the language, habits, religion, and morals
of the whites. But slavery had not made them thrifty, self-reliant, or
educated. Frederick Douglass said of the Negro at the end of his servitude:
"He had none of the conditions of self-preservation or self-protection. He was
free from the individual master, but he had nothing but the dusty road under
his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a
slave to the rains of summer and to the frosts of winter. He was turned loose,
naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky." To prove that he was free the
Negro thought he must leave his old master, change his name, quit work for a
time, perhaps get a new wife, and hang around the Federal soldiers in camp or