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

Following Mary Elizabeth Massey's 1964 work, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, scholars have written little about the Civil War refugee crisis. David Silkenat's latest work, Driven from Home: North Carolina's Civil War Refugee Crisis, brings the importance of the Confederacy's refugee crisis into the light for a new generation of scholars, building upon the recent work of Yael Sternhell (Routes of War), James Oakes (Freedom National), and others. Silkenat acknowledges Massey's contribution and hopes to build on her work with his focus on North Carolina: "This book endeavors to fulfill Massey's original intention by recognizing 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" (p. 4). Driven from Home takes the next step and explores many elements within the refugee crisis that occurred in North Carolina during the war.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the book is how Silkenat details the nuances between these different groupings of refugees. Certainly, most of the 250,000 southern white refugees faced similar troubles, including those in North Carolina. Many could not find suitable housing, had trouble procuring any kind of daily food rations, and worried about loved ones left behind. Issues of loyalty and race played an additionally critical role for so many caught in the crosshairs of war as so many Unionists and freedpeople were displaced during the war. Additionally, refugees had to face Victorian attitudes about aid and relief, making it that much more difficult to find help. Refugees dealt with significant hardships, contested states of slavery and loyalty shaped the refugee experience, and both black and white refugees had to work both with and against Union officials to survive. Understanding these three themes, argues Silkenat, best helps one to truly understand the refugee crisis in North Carolina. Here, he nicely separates these different groups and details how they experienced the war, whether this was the black refugees at Roanoke Island (chapters one and two), wealthier whites who fled along with their slaves (a process known as refugeeing—see chapters three and four), differences between refugees in the Piedmont compared to those in the mountains in the western part of the state (both pro-Confederates and Unionists), or those young girls (chapter five) who left for boarding schools as a means of avoiding as much of the "typical" refugee experience as they could manage. Rather than just lumping these people into a single group—refugees—Silkenat very nicely delineates these unique experiences and how they influenced each other during the course of the war.

In the end, Silkenat does a fine job of detailing just how different these refugees were—why they left, what they thought that the war meant, and the changed lives that many returned to when the war came to an end in the spring of 1865. It would be interesting to see how these different groups were treated during Reconstruction, especially by the Freedmen's Bureau, but that task will be left to whoever decides to follow the lead of Driven from Home. This book is valuable to both undergraduate courses and graduate-level seminars that concern the real war not getting in the books, as well as the avid Civil War reader looking for a well-researched and well-written book.