Politics in a Refugee Camp By early August 1863, Harriet Jacobs - former slave, memoirist, journalist and now aid worker in Virginia - had been at her work among the "contrabands" in Alexandria the better part of a year. She first visited the refugee camps the previous summer while reporting for William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, and by the end of 1862 she had committed herself to the burgeoning relief effort for the former slaves flooding the region around the capital. Jacobs was more than just another pair of hands. She took an active role in reform and education among the refugees, advocating for "marriage rites for the poor people" and beginning a "large sewing class of children and adults," as she reported in an April letter to John Sella Martin, a former North Carolina slave and minister then living in England. And, of course, Jacobs brought to Alexandria the abolitionist fame that came with having written the best-selling book "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Now occasionally referred to in the press as Mrs. Jacobs, she was at least equally well known as "Linda," the name she assumed in "Incidents" to protect those she left behind, and whom she'd also concealed behind pseudonyms, after escaping from Edenton, N.C., in 1842. "I had no motive of secrecy on my own account," she writes in the book's preface, "but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course." The winter in Alexandria had been devastating. Small pox ravaged the camp. In the same letter to Martin, Jacobs recalled the government burials of 800 refugees over the course of four and a half months, "beside many private burials, that were not put on the list, but were refugees. ... I found them packed together in the most miserable quarters, dying without the commonest necessities of life." What comforts she could note were made possible by donations from Northern relief associations, especially the New York Quakers who sponsored her. As the year pressed on, Jacobs had an invaluable partner and increasingly close friend in Julia Ann Wilbur, a Quaker from upstate New York, who had laid the groundwork for receiving refugees in Alexandria beginning in 1862. Reporting in the spring for The New York Evening Post, Ulysses B. Ward noted of Jacobs and Wilbur: "These two ladies have been energetically occupied in this self-sacrificing work, and there is no doubt that the sufferings of the negroes have been greatly alleviated by their untiring zeal." In his writing for the Evening Post, Ward also credited the work of Albert Gladwin, a Baptist minister from Connecticut who had arrived in Alexandria after years of itinerancy - raising funds, preaching on temperance - under the auspices of the American Baptist Free Mission Society. Appointed as government superintendent of the Alexandria camp in the first half of 1863, Gladwin would serve in close quarters with Jacobs and Wilbur and, despite their common work, often at cross-purposes and to very different ends. Wilbur spent early August 1863 away from Alexandria, and away from Jacobs, on summer retreat in East Avon, N.Y. Still, flooded with reports from friends and colleagues at work among the refugees, Wilbur found little rest. Writing to Anna M.C. Barnes, a friend and the secretary of the Rochester Ladies" Anti-Slavery Society, who had hired Wilbur as their agent in Alexandria, she reported: "These letters have worried me. I have had Washington & Georgetown on my mind as well as Alexandria lately. I do not sleep much, but when I do I live over again all my experience with those people; & if I talk much of them during the day I am sure to lose a night's rest. The abolitionist Gulielma Breed, secretary of the Colored Orphans Home in Washington, had written three times, each letter imploring Wilbur to hurry back. There was also a letter from Jacobs, still in Alexandria. Wilbur found Jacobs's report so troubling that she copied out the most disturbing parts for Barnes to read herself. This transcription is the only surviving piece of Jacobs's correspondence with Wilbur. Trouble was brewing with Gladwin, and with the federal government agents who oversaw the camp. There were two priorities at the Alexandra camp: keeping families together and moving refugees through efficiently. Jacobs and Wilbur had struggled to make the former a priority; by six a.m. every day, Jacobs, who had been separated from her family during her own flight north, was there to greet all newcomers at the barracks and make sure the families stayed intact. She had to be there early to get the jump on Gladwin, who, by order of the military governor, John P. Slough, was tasked with moving new refugees through Alexandria and onto government farms in Arlington. When he learned of Jacobs's efforts, Gladwin complained that her interference would get him arrested; he was not doing what he was hired to do. Jacobs tried to put him at ease. She explained to Wilbur, "I requested that we both might be arrested & then I would explain why I had interfered with these people, and he thought better of it & let the matter rest." But Gladwin wasn't appeased. A few days later, declaring that those who received government support would be subject to the will of the government, he marched into the government barracks and took away a black man to wait on him and a woman to cook for him on a stove he'd also taken away from the refugees. It was a symbolic way of asserting his control over the camp against Jacobs and Wilbur. The lines were drawn. Mothers came to Jacobs in distress. Lucinda Lewis, the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, told Jacobs she would give up her government rations if they could remain in Alexandria. Matilda Washington, a refugee mother of two - including a 10-week-old girl - from Occoquan, Va., also gave up her rations so she and her family could remain where they were. She soon became sick, "got wet through in a drenching rain," Jacobs reported, and was hospitalized. In a delirium brought on by her illness, Jacobs noted, Washington "called constantly on Miss Wilbur & Mrs. Jacobs to take her babies." The newborn she'd named Julia Wilbur Washington. Matilda thought of Julia as her best friend in the world. Jacobs sent the two children to be cared for in Wilbur's house. Amanda Bell, a refugee who had lived for a time in the Alexandria Slave Pen, part of which had been turned into a prison for secessionists, may have gotten the worst of it. In the time Wilbur had been away, an army corporal from Ohio, Amos Denman, had been assigned as Gladwin's assistant, "to help do his dirty work," as Jacobs put it. During all the morning he had been like a crazy man hunting up the poor refugees to send them to Washington, sent away 70 of the finest looking women & children I have seen yet. Bell's mother was to be among them. Gladwin refused to let her stay behind. In response, Jacobs sent Bell to General Slough, the military governor, who overturned the order in a letter he had Bell deliver to Gladwin herself. This infuriated the reverend, and he took out his anger by slapping Bell's little girl. The final piece of Jacobs's letter to Wilbur told of more early-morning movement of the refugees away from Gladwin and into the community she was building in Alexandria. It boasted hospitals and schools to serve the refugees. At her own expense, Amanda Bell would start a school before long at her former home in the slave pen. There were weddings. And there were burials. Despite the odds and the government orders, families and friends had come together in Alexandria and would continue to. "Last night 50 came," Jacobs wrote. I don't think he [Gladwin] has found many of them. I sent them away as early as possible. Jacobs did not fear Gladwin. "I am doing all I can to make him complain of me," she wrote. She filed an official complaint herself, she told Wilbur. And such complaints would continue throughout Gladwin's tenure as superintendent of the "contrabands." For her part, at least in one respect Wilbur was grateful to have left Alexandria for a time in Jacobs's hands. "Perhaps it is best that I am away now," she admitted to Barnes, "for if I should get too mad I might get into a fight with the Rev. Albert Gladwin." Still, she was eager to return. I feel that my place in in Alex. I am sure I can do more & better for these people than a stranger can. She'd had enough sleepless nights away. She missed her friends and her good work. And she feared what they all might face without her. Jacobs especially would need her help. Gladwin would be serious trouble, this much was clear. "If the devil does'nt catch Mr. G.," she told Barnes, "there is no use having any devil." Scott Korb is the associate editor of "The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers" and author of "Light without Fire: The Making of America's First Muslim College."