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By Root 1197 0

by which to combat these evils was instruction at every level in the virtues of temperance, marital fidelity, chastity, and domestic economy. The larger and the more urgently this task loomed, the more frequently went out the appeals for assistance—for more individuals like themselves who would dedicate their lives to the work of redemption. “The only thing I regret is, that there are not more Baptist and Methodist ministers down here,” the Reverend Arthur Waddell wrote from Beaufort, South Carolina. “When I say this, I mean colored ministers, and I do not mean the silk-gloved kind, and those who come down here to buy farms, and to cheat these poor people out of their rights. But I mean those who come down here to preach Christ in the way that St. Paul commanded Timothy.”15

But the work of moral reformation was considered too vast and too critical to leave to “colored ministers” alone. The white benevolent societies placed the highest priority on this kind of missionary labor. That was why Marcia Colton, upon arriving in Virginia, found herself assigned not to a classroom or to a church but to Craney Island, in Norfolk harbor, where she assumed responsibility for reforming a group of black prostitutes. In a prison-like encampment, she would attempt to direct these fallen women into “the paths of virtue” and toward “Christ the Fountain that cleaneth from all Sin.”

The Military & Moral authorities think it is a Military necessity to have a Magdalen Camp on Craney Island, a sort of out-door Prison Life where they can send these Women who having just emerged from Slavery, are beset by bad Men (& many of these are connected with the Federal Army,) led astray from the paths of virtue. And the influence of those who have thus fallen being contagious with others, it is decided to arrest & send them [without a trial] to the Island.

Although not relishing the assignment, Miss Colton accepted it “in the name and for the sake of Christ.” Her task was made no easier by the conduct of the soldiers guarding the encampment, some of whom effected sexual liaisons with the black women. “Alas—alas!” reported Miss Colton, “that Sin,—the Sin of Sodom is so common in our Army. It’s a Sore trial to Me that I do not have any Christian on the Island amongst the Guard and no one even comes near Me to offer Me any support.” Moreover, she complained, the officers in charge of the camp viewed the problem “with Man’s judgment,” while “I from a Christian & moral standpoint, with Woman’s Pity for the degraded and fallen of our own sex.” Whatever methods she adopted to enlighten the women in the ways of virtuous living, the results were less than gratifying. Upon serving out their “sentences,” the women often returned to their “old haunts” in Norfolk, where they would soon be arrested again and returned to the island. “There are so many temptations in Norfolk, and they have so little moral power that it’s hardly possible for them to resist.… I am not able to spend much time in instructing them. They are not disposed to listen much to instruction.” Despairing over her ineffectuality, Miss Colton suggested that the source of the problem might lie in the African heathenism to which these “poor degraded freedwomen” clung. “I am aware when I say this that you will repel the Idea from your Mind as quickly as possible,” she wrote to her supervisor. “Yet nevertheless I think it True. How else can I get any excuse for this predominance of Animal habits which show themselves all the while with most of them?”16

Not the least of the “barbarisms” associated with slavery that dismayed both white and black missionaries was, in fact, the excessive emotionalism, frenzy, and “heathenism” they claimed to find in the religious practices of the freedmen. Upon visiting a service on Roanoke Island, Henry M. Turner thought the black parishioners worshipped “under a lower class of ideas” and entertained crude conceptions of God. “Hell fire, brimstone, damnation, black smoke, hot lead, &c, appeared to be presented by the speaker as man’s highest incentive to serve God, while