It was common enough that those working in the Union camps or strongholds held literacy classes for the enslaved people who made it to them. Typically referred to as "contraband", escaped enslaved people were a routine part of Union camps. Susie King Taylor was the first Black woman to openly teach formerly enslaved people and wrote about her experiences. While she mostly stayed on St Simon Island in Georgia, she referenced the formal and informal networks set up to provide resources to escaped people. The networks were primarily organized by religious groups, but they were the foundation of what would become the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands started by Lincoln in the last year of the war.

One of the most detailed books on the education of enslaved people (before, during, and after the war) is Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (2005) by Heather Andrea Williams. In her chapter on education in contraband camps, she says:

In sites of Union occupation, so many African Americans fled slavery that they began to influence Union policy, ultimately transforming the military's treatment of slaves seeking refuge. From an initial policy of noninterference with slave property, the Union came to understand two things. First, it was powerless to stop the flow of enslaved people into Union camps. Second, it could not successfully conduct the war without African American assistance.

One of the most important points that Williams and other historians and researchers stress is that enslaved people were not passive during this period. The reason the camps had to provide literacy classes was because the enslaved people demanded them. A phrase that has always stayed with me was used to describe the sentiment around education at the time: every freedperson a learner, every person a teacher, every place a school