Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.

Moore, Henry P., photog.

[Contrabands aboard U.S. Ship Vermont, Port Royal, South Carolina.]

[Port Royal, South Carolina, 1862–63.] Albumen print, 5.25” x 8” on larger paperboard mount. CONDITION: Very good, rich tonality, some fading to edges of image.

New Hampshire photographer Henry P. Moore’s rare and iconic Civil War photograph documenting a group of formerly enslaved men, recently classified as contrabands of war, aboard a U.S. ship in Port Royal, South Carolina, not long into the Union blockade.

The men shown here, no longer slaves but not yet citizens, wear navy-issued clothes and gather beneath the main mast of the 74-gun warship USS Vermont, aboard which many of them likely mustered into the U.S. Navy. Very early in the Civil War, Union commanders were confronted with the question of what to do with slave refugees. In May of 1861, General Benjamin Butler had classified them as “contrabands of war,” and in September, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles announced that, “where their services can be made useful,” officers should “enlist them for the naval service, [with] no higher rating than boys, at a compensation of $10 per month and one ration per day” (Official Records p. 689). Contrabands, in turn, made essential contributions to the Union effort, and though working in inferior conditions—often for vastly inferior compensation—they offered their services as “mechanics, cooks, stevedores, and teamsters,” and proved useful as “sailors, spies, guides, nurses, orderlies, and producers of food” (p. 3). Among the most important contributions of Black Americans to the navy was their service as coastal pilots (as famously exemplified by Robert Smalls, who in May of 1862 captured the Confederate steamer Planter in Charleston Harbor) and as informants, providing “reliable intelligence to the commanders of the Potomac Flotilla and the North and South Atlantic Blockading Squadrons about Confederate fortifications, troop movements, blockade runners, and the location of torpedoes and gun batteries” (p. 3).

The USS Vermont arrived in Port Royal in April of 1862 and served as an “ordnance, receiving, and store ship in the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron until being transferred to New York in 1864 (“Vermont”). The names of dozens of “Contrabands” and “Negroes” are listed in the muster rolls of the Vermont, the vast majority of them coming “From Shore,” with birthplaces across North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Virginia, and professions ranging from carpenter, brickmaker, and cooper, to waiter, coachman, ostler, and more.

Henry P. Moore (1835–1911), a New Hampshire native, traveled to South Carolina on two or perhaps three occasions during the early years of the Civil War, following the Third New Hampshire Volunteers. Moore arrived on Hilton Head Island in late February of 1862, just a few months after it had been captured in the Battle of Port Royal (November 7, 1861). He was greeted with glee by his fellow New Hampshirites: “As we were sitting around our fire after supper,” recounted one member of the regiment, “Capt. Ranlet came from the main camp bringing a person whom he introduced…as a ‘Secesh’ prisoner; and who was it but our friend H. P. Moore just from Concord, and natural as life. If you could have seen us pitch into him and shake him up, you might have a very small idea as to the strength of our ‘home feeling.’ He comes with the intention of taking views of the camps and plantations, and has had over one hundred applications for large sized pictures. He is just the man we want, for it has been impossible to obtain pictures of any kind worth having, or durable enough to retain their color even a month.” Moore traveled throughout Union controlled territory in the South, staying through April or May of 1861 on his first trip and from April 22nd to the end of May the following year. He “became best known for his pictures of Sea Island slaves. Photographs of slaves are relatively rare…[and] Moore’s historic images of African Americans are extraordinary” (Bolster and Anderson, p. 17).

Moore grew up in Goffstown and then Concord, New Hampshire, in an inn-running family, and pursued a variety of artistic professions, working first as a viewmaker (he sold town views to Endicott & Company, J. H. Bufford, and others), a photographer (successfully capitalizing on the market for spirit photos in the 1870s), and, in 1868, inventing a lucrative method of duplicating photographs, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and other images, which he called the “silvertype.” After a brief stint in retirement, dabbling in taxidermy and poultry farming, Moore returned to business, decorating chinaware with photographic images.

A remarkable photograph documenting formerly-enslaved navy servicemen aboard a U.S. warship, likely taken at least a year before the Emancipation Proclamation.

REFERENCES: Hudson, Leonne M. “Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Navy,” Civil War Book Review Vol. 12, No. 1 (2010); “Vermont (SSN 792)” at General Dynamics online; Bolster, W. Jeffrey and Hilary Anderson. Soldiers, Sailors, Slaves, and Ships : The Civil War Photographs of Henry P. Moore (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1999); “Muster Rolls of the U.S.S. Vermont 1862–1864” at National Archives online; Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 16 (Washington, 1903).

Item #10356

Price: $22,500.00

Add to Wish List