Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony, 1862-1867

Abstract

Reconstruction scholars and those interested in the growing debate over the federal government's responsibility to the descendants of slaves will benefit from the poignant story of the Roanoke Island freedmen's colony, told engagingly by Patricia C. Click. Like many stories of Reconstruction, the tale of the Ro-anoke Colony is one of hope and possibility transformed into bitterness and despair. Click convincingly argues that the Roanoke story, while not widely known and even lost in local black memory, is “one of national significance. ” She places Roanoke within the context of a range of experiments in free labor following emancipation while showing its unique features. Established in 1863, Roanoke was largely the brainchild of the Rev. Horace James, a Congregational minister from Massachusetts, who was placed in charge of the thousands of eastern North Carolina slaves who fled to the Union army after the capture of Roanoke Island by Ambrose Burnside in February 1862. As an embodiment of James's values, the colony provided “a grand opportunity to put into practice ideas about abolitionism and evangelicalism that had been simmering in the North for more than forty years.” Conceived from the outset as a permanent, self-sustaining settlement modeled on a New England town, the colony was to support itself through domestic manufactures, small-scale agriculture, and fishing. Roanoke also offered land-ownership, and James assigned lots to free families “for improvement” since “freeholding went hand-in-hand with freedom.”.