James City: A Mecca for Freedom

Across the Trent River from New Bern, this community was founded in eighteen sixty-three as one of the earliest planned resettlement camps for formerly enslaved people in the United States. After Union forces captured New Bern in eighteen sixty-two, more than ten thousand people who had escaped slavery flooded into the city seeking freedom. The army consolidated several refugee settlements into one here, on confiscated land that had belonged to Confederate Colonel Peter G.

Evans. The Reverend Horace James, chaplain of the Twenty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment and Superintendent of Negro Affairs for the North Carolina District, oversaw the community. By eighteen sixty-five nearly three thousand people lived here in eight hundred houses.

The settlement was renamed James City in his honor. Residents farmed, built churches, and established schools, making it one of the most self-sustaining freedmen communities of the Civil War era.