Self-Emancipated Blacks Behind Federal Lines

On May 14, 1862, a group of formerly enslaved men, women, and children gather outside a building on the Foller Plantation, located at Cumberland Landing on the Pamunkey River in New Kent County. During the Peninsula Campaign of the Civil War, photographer James F. Gibson made a series of images of the Federal troop encampment at the landing. Among those glass-plate negatives is this portrait of so-called contrabands, or enslaved people who had emancipated themselves by fleeing behind Union lines.