For African Americans who escaped enslavement, the Union military occupation of Alexandria during the
American Civil War created opportunity on an unprecedented scale. They flooded into Union-controlled areas as Federal troops extended their occupation of the seceded states. Safely behind Union lines, the cities of Alexandria and Washington offered not only comparative freedom and protection from their former enslavers, but employment for refugees. Over the course of the war, Alexandria was transformed by the Union Army into a major supply depot and transport and hospital center, all under army control. Because people who escaped slavery were still legally considered property of their owners, until the
Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) freed them, they were classified as
"contraband property" by the Union Army so that they would not have to return these people to bondage under supporters of the Confederacy. Without this designation, the Union soldiers and officers would be in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. African American men and women took positions with the U.S. Army as construction workers, nurses and hospital stewards, longshoremen, painters, wood cutters, teamsters, laundresses, cooks, gravediggers, personal servants, and ultimately as soldiers and sailors. They were also hired as domestic day laborers by other citizens. According to one statistic, the population of Alexandria had exploded to 18,000 by the fall of 1863 – an increase of 10,000 people in 16 months. Once in Alexandria, many people arrived in ill health and malnourished after walking long distances from other counties in Virginia. They were housed in barracks and whatever housing they could build for themselves. In such close quarters, with poor sanitation,
smallpox and
typhoid outbreaks were prevalent and death was common, as it was in most military encampments. More than half of those buried in the cemetery were African American children under age five. In February 1864, after hundreds had died, the commander of the Alexandria military district, General
John P. Slough, confiscated a parcel of undeveloped land at the corner of South Washington and Church streets from a pro-Confederate owner to be used as a cemetery specifically for burial of African Americans. Burials started in March that year. The cemetery operated under General Slough's command. Its oversight was supervised by Alexandria's civilian Superintendent of Contrabands, the Rev. Albert Gladwin, who made arrangements for burials. Each grave was identified with a whitewashed, wooden grave marker. In 1868, after Congress ended most functions of the
Freedmen's Bureau, the federal government stopped managing the cemetery and returned the property to its original owners. Their descendants conveyed the undeveloped land to the Catholic Diocese of Richmond in 1917. A Washington Post newspaper article in 1892 stated the wooden grave markers had decayed and people had unofficially continued using the site for burials. The "Book of Records" maintained first by the Office of the Superintendent of Contrabands, and later by the Freedmen's Bureau, documents the names of 1,711 people buried at the cemetery between 1864 and 1869. ==Rediscovery of the Cemetery==