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.