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

Over the past decade, historians of emancipation have paid increasing attention to how questions of mobility shaped the African American experience during the Civil War. Important scholarship by Chandra Manning, Yael Sternhell, Steven Hahn, Glenn Brasher, and Jim Downs, among others, has provided a fuller picture of how African Americans escaped bondage and began the transition from slavery to freedom in refugee camps. (See Yael A. Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2012]. Glenn David Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2014]; Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War [New York: Knopf, 2016]; Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012]; Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2009], and A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003]; David Silkenat, Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2015]). Built on extensive research in the National Archives, Amy Murrell Taylor’s Embattled Freedom provides the clearest, most balanced assessment of what life in these camps was like and how the camps shaped the course of emancipation. As a process, emancipation proceeded slowly: in “slow motion” as Taylor describes it (8). African Americans did not become free when they entered refugee camps; rather, they lived in a profoundly uncertain status for most of the war (8). Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, they remained in transitionary phase, not enslaved, but not fully free.

Taylor estimates that five hundred thousand enslaved African Americans became refugees during the Civil War, taking shelter in nearly three hundred refugee camps. To explore the heterogeneous refugee experience, Embattled Freedom highlights a few individuals: Edward and Emma Whitehurst, who established a store in the refugee camp built on ruins of Hampton, Virginia, only to have it ransacked by soldiers from McClellan’s retreating army; Eliza Bogan, who struggled amid death and disease to survive in a Helena, Arkansas, refugee camp, uncertain if her husband, now a Union soldier, would return or if she would ever see her children, still enslaved, again; and Gabriel Burdett, who established a ministry and became assistant superintendent of the Refugee Home in Camp Nelson, Kentucky. These diverse experiences emphasize Taylor’s larger point: emancipation unfolded not in a linear fashion but with hopeful advancement and devasting setbacks.

Embattled Freedom deftly illustrates how the practical necessities of refugee life revealed deeply embedded ideas about place, self-determination, and dependence. Refugees struggled to get adequate housing, food, and clothing, and efforts by the US Army, refugee aid organizations, and the refugees themselves to secure them were fraught with tensions and complications. Fearful of cultivating dependence, military officials and aid workers intentionally limited relief supplies, while African American refugees rejected donated clothing that reminded them too much of slavery. Although African Americans saw refugee camps as places of sanctuary, their experiences within camps often demonstrated their tenuous status. Especially in the western theater, Union officials often closed refugee camps with little notice, relocating refugees to new camps or forcing them to find new homes. At the war’s conclusion, the Johnson administration moved to close the camps as quickly as possible. With their closure came the destruction of the lives refugees had built there: homes, gardens, and jobs disappeared, though some social organizations (orphan asylums, schools, and churches) did survive. To demonstrate the precarious status of African American refugees, Taylor focuses on military efforts to close Camp Nelson in Kentucky, a state that still had legal slavery in the summer of 1865...