Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis by David Silkenat (review)

The literature on the Civil War experience continues to grow, as scholars begin to address new issues within the context of older historiography. David Silkenat’s Driven from Home continues this trend by addressing and updating Mary Elizabeth Massey’s pathbreaking Refugee Life in the Confederacy. Published in 1964, Massey’s original manuscript ran over six hundred pages and addressed “‘all groups uprooted by the war— Confederate and Union sympathizers, Negroes, Indians, and whites’” (2). As Silkenat observes, Massey’s external reviewers pressed her to pare down her manuscript. As a result, she focused on southerners who were forced to refugee within the Confederacy. Given the extant primary sources, the book’s central characters are members of the southern white elite who were literate.

Silkenat seeks to accomplish what Massey originally intended, but his focus is on the North Carolina piedmont region. He notes that his endeavor, unlike Massey’s, was aided inestimably by the creation of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project in 1976 at the University of Maryland. He places his work within the context of the work of other scholars who have also focused on the experience of African American slave refugees. According to Silkenat, Driven from Home “recognize[es] that one of the most important and distinctive features of the Confederate refugee crisis was its diversity, as Southerners of all races, genders, classes, and political alliances chose or were forced to move as a consequence of the Civil War” (4).

In his investigation of the refugee experience in the piedmont region, Silkenat examines “five distinct elements”: African Americans, white southern Unionists, Confederate whites, Confederate whites who brought along their slaves, and southern women enrolled in North Carolina boarding schools (6). Throughout the book, Silkenat refers to the refugee “crisis.” As he notes, “I use the term ‘crisis’ not only to reflect the number of refugees and the difficulty of their circumstances but also because the response of governmental and charitable organizations was often woefully inadequate” (7).

According to Silkenat, the North Carolina refugee crisis began early, when Union general Ambrose E. Burnside captured Roanoke Island in February 1862. The first wave of refugees to flee to the interior were African American slaves. Acknowledging the dearth of primary sources, Silkenat pieces together the slaves’ refugee experience using accounts written by Union soldiers and relief workers. What those sources reveal is that in March 1862, New Bern became the “heart of the Union occupation” of the North Carolina piedmont, and as a result slaves flocked to New Bern for the protection afforded by the occupiers (13).

Slaveholders in the region did not sit idly by as their property fled into the interior. Locals significantly increased slave patrols, and home guard units added to the effort to stem the flood. The slaveholders also directed the slave patrols and home guard “to use lethal violence,” which was a far cry from the antebellum practice of merely returning the runaways to the rightful owners (23).

Despite such vigilance, African Americans continued to seek refuge in the New Bern area. General Burnside alerted Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that he was putting the bondsmen to work. But the tide of refugees soon convinced Burnside he needed assistance. On March 30, 1862, Burnside appointed New Yorker Vincent Colyer as “superintendent of the poor” (27). A former member of the U.S. Christian Commission, Colyer opted to do relief work on behalf of African Americans in the field. Subsequently, he journeyed to Burnside’s command and assisted the Union general in hiring the former slaves to do manual labor.

The influx of the slave refugees produced what could be considered culture shock to the Union soldiers. Having only dealt with “slavery in the abstract, the arrival of hundreds of refugee slaves challenged their ideas about race and slavery” (30). Many were surprised that their stereotypes of an ignorant race were challenged; others saw nothing but...