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Rare Civil War Sheet Music, The Contraband Schottische, 1861 – Black History
Composed for the Piano by Septimus Winner.
Published by Lee & Walker 722 Chestnut St., W. H. Boner & Co. 1102 Chestnut St.
Lithograph by Thomas Sinclair, Philadelphia.
Measures approximately 13 5/8” x 10 1/2” 6 pp.
Condition: Good: Foxing and soiling throughout; Light bleedthrough; Repaired closed tears on right edges on pp. 3 & 5; Spine is taped; dampstaining on bottom edges throughout; Edges are worn, but corners are mostly intact; (See pictures for condition)
Note: A copy of this same title sold for $750 on-line at livesaleeers in 2014
Rare - Civil War-era sheet music by popular 19th- century songwriter Septimus Winner, featuring a cover illustration showing four \"contraband\" slaves tumbling about while running from an overseer with a whip. The children, while in general disarray, maintain a jovial disposition as evidenced by the slight smiles of those in the foreground.Dedicated to General Benjamin F. Butler, who first declared captured runaway slaves to be the contraband of war, inspiring the Confiscation Act of August 1861, which permitted the seizure of any property being used to pursue actions against the Union, including slaves. This important and very historical context of this piece concerns the first “Contrabands” better known as Slaves.
Excerpt below fromThe ForgottenThe Contraband of America and the Road to Freedom
ByEric Wills| FromPreservation|May/June 2011
A group of African American refugees, called contraband, who worked for the Union army as teamsters. The photo was taken c. 1864 in Bermuda Hundred, Va., just south of Richmond.Credit: Library of Congress
\"Their names were Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend. Little evidence documents their existence as enslaved field hands on a farm near Hampton, Va., aside from a few scribbled notes in an overseer\'s journal, listing them as property. But their lives were forever changed after the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. The three men were taken by their master to Sewell\'s Point, near present-day Norfolk, and put to work building an artillery battery for the Confederacy. Within days, they learned that their owner wanted to take them to North Carolina, where, separated from their families, they would be put to work constructing another rebel outpost.
They had a decision to make: Go with their master and aid the Confederate war effort? Or embark on a risky run for freedom by escaping to the Union stronghold at Fort Monroe? Mallory, Baker, and Townsend knew that if they were turned back at the fort, they would likely face whipping—or worse. They also knew that if they somehow persuaded the Union soldiers to offer them refuge, their families in Hampton might be harmed in retribution. They didn\'t know that the consequences of their decision would mark a turning point in the war, long before the battles of Vicksburg or Gettysburg.
On the evening of May 23, as Confederate sympathizers celebrated Virginia\'s decision to secede, the three men made their move, rowing a small boat across Hampton Roads toFort Monroe, one of the only Union-controlled outposts in the South. The fort\'s commander, Gen. Benjamin Butler, was no abolitionist—he had voted for Jefferson Davis at the 1860 Democratic National Convention. And Union policy on slavery was clear: President Abraham Lincoln maintained from the outset of hostilities that he had no intention of interfering with the \"peculiar institution\"; rather, the Union\'s aim was to crush the Southern rebellion.
Nevertheless, Butler realized the absurdity of honoring the Fugitive Slave Law, which dictated that he return the three runaways to their owner. They had been helping to construct a Confederate battery that threatened his fort. Why send them back and bolster that effort?
So the general struck upon a politically expedient solution: Because Virginia had seceded from the Union, he argued, he no longer had a constitutional obligation to return the runaways. Rather, in keeping with military law governing war between nations, he would seize the three runaways as contraband—property to be used by the enemy against the Union.
Lincoln let the decision stand; Butler, after all, hadn\'t challenged the status of enslaved people as property. Yet Mallory, Baker, and Townsend\'s escape and the general\'s clever gambit proved momentous, the repercussions heralding the beginning of slavery\'s end. For when other enslaved Africans Americans heard that three men had been granted refuge, they began flocking to Freedom\'s Fortress, as they called Fort Monroe. They came despite rebel rumors that the Yankees would eat them, sell them into slavery in Cuba, process them into fertilizer, or make them pull carts like oxen.\"
~Isle of Skye Books~
