“The key to East Virginia showing the exact relative positions of Fortress Monroe, Rip Raps, Newport News, Sewalls [sic] Point, Norfolk, Gosport Navy Yard and expressing the soundings of every part of Hampton Roads & Elizabeth River”

In November 1862, hundreds of freedpeople were removed from the shelter of a hospital to make room for Union troops arriving from New York. The tents onboard those ships were destroyed in a storm during that voyage. Nearly a thousand men, women, and children waited on the wharf for hours to be transported to Craney Island. Families were separated. People suffered illness and exposure. Craney Island was a strip of land “about a quarter of a mile wide and three quarters of a mile long.”

Amy Murrell Taylor. Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), page 87.