During the Civil War, most white Stafford residents greeted the arrival of the Union army in April 1862 with outrage and fear, but many enslaved people across the region rejoiced at the chance for freedom. Thousands left houses, farms, and plantations and headed north toward Union lines. Some took jobs with the Union army as paid servants to officers, earning 25 to 40 cents per day plus a ration, but for most former slaves the journey to freedom continued to and culminated at Aquia Landing, where soldiers shepherded them onto steamboats for the short trip up the Potomac to Washington, D.C. When the Union army evacuated the area in September 1862, a final surge of freedom-seekers flooded Aquia Landing. Among them was Fredericksburg slave John Washington, who slipped aboard the Washington-bound steamer Keyport and reached 6th Street Wharf in Washington, D.C., on the night of September 1, 1862, in a hard rain. That spring and summer, as many as 10,000 slaves made the journey into Union lines to freedom, forming what one observer called a continuous black line of men, women, and children moving north along the railroad with all their worldly goods on their heads.