There was little ground for this apprehension, in fact, if their readjustment and development in the contraband camps could be considered an indication of what the Negroes would eventually do.  Taking all things into consideration, most unbiased observers felt that blacks in the camps deserved well of their benefactors.[36] According to Levi Coffin, these contrabands were, in 1864, disposed of as follows:  “In military services as soldiers, laundresses, cooks, officers’ servants and laborers in the various staff departments, 41,150; in cities, on plantations and in freedmen’s villages and cared for, 72,500.  Of these 62,300 were entirely self-supporting, just as any industrial class anywhere else, as planters, mechanics, barbers, hackmen and draymen, conducting enterprises on their own responsibility or working as hired laborers.”  The remaining 10,200 received subsistence from the government. 3,000 of these were members of families whose heads were carrying on plantations, and had undertaken cultivation of 4,000 acres of cotton, pledging themselves to pay the government for their subsistence from the first income of the crop.  The other 7,200 included the paupers, that is, all Negroes over and under the self-supporting age, the crippled and sick in hospitals.  This class, however, instead of being unproductive, had then under cultivation 500 acres of corn, 790 acres of vegetables, and 1,500 acres of cotton, besides working at wood chopping and other industries.  There were reported in the aggregate over 100,000 acres of cotton under cultivation, 7,000 acres of which were leased and cultivated by blacks.  Some Negroes were managing as many as 300 or 400 acres each.[37] Statistics showing exactly how much the numbers of contrabands in the various branches of the service increased are wanting, but in view of the fact that the few thousand soldiers here given increased to about 200,000 before the close of the Civil War, the other numbers must have been considerable, if they all grew the least proportionately.

Much industry was shown among these refugees.  Under this new system they acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of wages and learned to see the fundamental difference between freedom and slavery.  Some Yankees, however, seeing that they did less work than did laborers in the North, considered them lazy, but the lack of industry was customary in the South and a river should not be expected to rise higher than its source.  One of their superintendents said that they worked well without being urged, that there was among them a public opinion against idleness, which answered for discipline, and that those put to work with soldiers labored longer and did the nicer parts.  “In natural tact and the faculty of getting a livelihood,” says the same writer, “the contrabands are inferior to the Yankees, but quite equal to the mass of southern population."[38] The Negroes also showed capacity to organize labor and use capital in the promotion of enterprises.  Many of them purchased land and cultivated it to great profit both to the community and to themselves.  Others entered the service of the government as mechanics and contractors, from the employment of which some of them realized handsome incomes.