Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Refugee Camps by Amy Murrell Taylor (review)

The study of the Civil War remains a vibrant field for academic historians because scholars have moved away from strictly focusing on the spaces where battles took place. Building upon the pioneering work of Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979), Embattled Freedom serves as an exemplary example of this shift in attention. During the Civil War, nearly half a million enslaved people fled their owners, creating an enormous refugee crisis for the United States government to deal with while simultaneously fighting to defeat the Confederacy. In eight chapters, historian Amy Murrell Taylor builds the narrative around the experiences of four formerly enslaved refugees in three distinct Civil War geographies: the Eastern Theater centered on Fort Monroe, Virginia; the Western Theater centered on Helena, Arkansas; and the Union South centered on Camp Nelson, Kentucky. By choosing these three diverse refugee camps among the three hundred camps that she identified, Taylor explores the similarities and differences in the refugees’ experiences, and why those differences occurred during the war. Justifying her approach, Taylor notes, “Wartime emancipation was a profoundly localized process, as anything embedded in military conflict is, beholden to local variance in strategy, resources, leadership, and the environment” (p.17).

Within the spaces of these refugee areas, Taylor focuses on the vocational, material, spiritual, and educational aspects of the freed people’s daily lives. For example, Taylor covers the work refugees found in and around the camps, paying expert attention to the gendered nature of the work. The Union military forces needed male labor to build fortifications and to work as teamsters and servants for the Union armies, while women labored to grow cotton on abandoned southern plantations, literally occupying the land for the Union cause. Later, the Union army recruited the men into the ranks, often sending them to distant theaters, leaving the refugee camps filled predominantly with white male soldiers and African American women. This led to Union officials’ fears of soldiers raping the undefended refugees. Such fears led to the forced removal of refugees from some camps onto barren, isolated islands along the coastline or in the Mississippi River, exacerbating the refugees’ struggles to build new lives outside of slavery.

Taylor’s best chapters examine the logistics and distribution of the Union government’s limited resources for the refugee camps, such as housing, food, and clothing. The military bureaucracy controlled access to these human necessities because they were mostly shipped through Union supply systems, which meant that the refugees had to navigate institutions whose primary focus was winning the war, not caring for refugees. Hence, as Taylor convincingly argues, the fortunes of the refugees rested upon “military necessity.” If the refugees’ needs fit what the Union military needed in the area, such as labor for fortifications or growing cotton on abandoned Confederate land, they received more supplies and protection. When Union forces moved away from an area to penetrate deeper into the Confederacy, the camps no longer directly served the military’s purposes and they consequently suffered from neglect or were dismantled despite the obvious needs of the refugees.

Moreover, the federal government and northern charities did not evenly and freely grant this aid and support. Even while distributing material resources and other forms of aid to the refugees, government officials and northern charity workers wanted to avoid creating dependency among the former slaves and erroneously assumed they lacked knowledge of markets and vocational skills. Thus, the refugees also had to navigate the paternalism and racism of those tasked with helping them make the transition to freedom.

The sudden conclusion of the war in early 1865, according to Taylor, exposed the tenuousness of the refugees’ situation to military necessity. Since their labor was no longer needed to support the Union cause, government officials forced the closure of most of the refugee camps, once again...