The Civil War was just days old when the first enslaved men, women, and children began fleeing their plantations to seek refuge inside the lines of the Union army as it moved deep into the heart of ...the Confederacy. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more followed in a mass exodus from slavery that would destroy the system once and for all. Drawing on an extraordinary survey of slave refugee camps throughout the country,Embattled Freedomreveals as never before the everyday experiences of these refugees from slavery as they made their way through the vast landscape of army-supervised camps that emerged during the war. Amy Murrell Taylor vividly reconstructs the human world of wartime emancipation, taking readers inside military-issued tents and makeshift towns, through commissary warehouses and active combat, and into the realities of individuals and families struggling to survive physically as well as spiritually. Narrating their journeys in and out of the confines of the camps, Taylor shows in often gripping detail how the most basic necessities of life were elemental to a former slave's quest for freedom and full citizenship.The stories of individuals--storekeepers, a laundress, and a minister among them--anchor this ambitious and wide-ranging history and demonstrate with new clarity how contingent the slaves' pursuit of freedom was on the rhythms and culture of military life. Taylor brings new insight into the enormous risks taken by formerly enslaved people to find freedom in the midst of the nation's most destructive war.
The Civil War tends to be remembered as a vast sequence of battles, with a turning point at Gettysburg and a culmination at Appomattox. But in the guerrilla theater, the conflict was a vast sequence ...of home invasions, local traumas, and social degeneration that did not necessarily end in 1865. This book chronicles the history of "guerrilla memory," the collision of the Civil War memory "industry" with the somber realities of irregular warfare in the borderlands of Missouri and Kansas.
In the first accounting of its kind, Matthew Christopher Hulbert's book analyzes the cultural politics behind how Americans have remembered, misremembered, and re-remembered guerrilla warfare in political rhetoric, historical scholarship, literature, and film and at reunions and on the stage. By probing how memories of the guerrilla war were intentionally designed, created, silenced, updated, and even destroyed, Hulbert ultimately reveals a continent-wide story in which Confederate bushwhackers-pariahs of the eastern struggle over slavery-were transformed into the vanguards of American imperialism in the West.
Editor's Note: The following represents the acceptance speech for the Watson Brown Prize for the best book published on the Civil War era in the calendar year 2018. Had there been a more truthful ...reckoning with this history, it would not be a notable thing still, in 2019, to write a history of the Civil War with African American subjects at the center. Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction.6 But when the problems come first, the people tend to get sorted into categories defined by those problems-they are unionists or Confederates, Republicans or Democrats (Peace and War), free or enslaved, and so forth-and then we continually stumble upon those who defy those categories and don't do what we expect them to do. For a long time in our scholarly literature, those who refugeed themselves from slavery during the war have been continually, and strikingly, grouped together as a "flood," a "swarming," a "rising tide"-a collection of people not at all distinguished from one another who, collectively, pushed forward the fight for emancipation with the power of their numbers.8 For W. E. B. Du Bois, that collective action was itself significant and constituted a "general strike" against the system of chattel bondage.9 Their large numbers did matter-the collective was powerful-but the enduring impulse to think of the people in the aggregate left so much unanswered.
Though few people have heard of A.D. Smith (1811-65), this nineteenth-century knight-errant left his mark on some of the key events of his times in several states, personifying the nineteenth-century ...impulse to move across the American landscape. Smith's Quixotic trail began in upstate New York, wound westward to the Ohio and Wisconsin frontier, southward to the federally occupied Sea Islands of South Carolina, and finally ended aboard a northbound steamer.
In Ohio, Smith became involved with a paramilitary group, the Hunters' Lodge, which elected him the "President of the Republic of Canada." In Wisconsin he achieved notoriety as the judge who dared to declare the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional, lighting one of many fuses that sparked the Civil War. In South Carolina he fought passionately for the property rights of freedmen. Smith believed in civic movements based on Jeffersonian democracy and republican ideals. Civic participation, he believed, was a fundamental part of being a good American. This civic impulse resulted in his enthusiastic embrace of the reform movements of the day and his absolute dedication to radicalism.
A detective story set against the backdrop of the volatile antebellum era, this gripping biography lays bare, in funny, accessible prose, just what it is that historians really do all day and how obsessive they can be-assembling a jigsaw puzzle of secret documents, probate records, court testimony, speeches, correspondence, newspaper coverage, and genealogical research to tell the story of a man like Smith, of his vision for the United States, and, more generally, of the value of remembering secondary historical characters.
Clothing Bodies Taylor, Amy Murrell
Embattled Freedom,
11/2018
Book Chapter
The bodies of refugees were closely watched, as each man, woman, and child made their way into army encampments. Artists documented the torn dresses, ill-fitting pants, and various hats and head ...wraps that they wore into the camps; missionaries who wrote letters and reports home left little to the imagination when describing their clothing, or lack thereof. The refugees were “naked,” “half-naked,” “unclothed,” or “wretchedly clad,” wearing “filthy rags” or nothing more than a “ragged piece of carpet,” as various religious and benevolent workers put it.¹ “Thousands of poor liberated negroes are flocking to our borders,” opened a report by
Finding Shelter Taylor, Amy Murrell
Embattled Freedom,
11/2018
Book Chapter
The Emancipation Proclamation may have made people fearful in the recently Unionized region around Fort Monroe, while it supported the march toward freedom in other places still considered ...rebellious. But wherever it reached—or did not reach—the proclamation made one thing clear: place mattered. The president’s January 1863 order, with its carefully worded passages listing which counties in Virginia or parishes in Louisiana would be exempted, or which border states would still be allowed to enslave, was closely attuned to geography.¹ It was a particular kind of geography, though—a fundamentally political one. The regions excluded were those deemed
