The contraband policy freed Black refugees into camps where a quarter of them died

Evidence

Lincoln reluctantly signed the bill, which said that slaveholders forfeited their ownership of any property, including enslaved Africans, used by the Confederate military. The Union could confiscate such people as “contraband.” Legally, they were no longer enslaved; nor were they freed. They could, however, work for the Union Army for wages and live in the abysmal conditions of the contraband camps. One out of every four of the 1.1 million men, women, and children in the contraband camps died in one of the worst public health disasters in US history. Only 138 physicians were assigned to care for them. Some physicians called contrabands “animals” and blamed their mass deaths on inherent Black debilities, not the extreme inadequacies of sanitation, food, and medical care. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 576

Categorization

• XREF: Direct demonstration of Kendi’s core thesis: material policy (confiscation, under-resourced camps) precedes and produces the racist ‘inherent Black debility’ justifications — physicians blamed inherent debilities for deaths caused by policy neglect.
• DEFINE: The ‘contraband’ category sits between enslaved and freed — a legal limbo created by policy, crystallizing Kendi’s point that policy decisions, not ideas, generate racial categories.