Grappling with Loss

This chapter examines how victory for the Union could bring loss for the residents of the refugee camps. The army’s gradual demobilization meant the loss of employment and the loss of wages for many of them, as well as the loss of physical protection. President Andrew Johnson’s decision to return abandoned and confiscated land to ex-Confederates, rather than pursue a policy of land redistribution for freedpeople, also brought another kind of loss. Most of the refugee camps were built on these lands and therefore were closed by federal authorities over the course of 1865 and 1866. This resulted in the loss of houses, gardens, churches, schools, and stores built by the refugees, despite their vigorous protests. They were then uprooted and forced to confront the extreme difficulty of trying to purchase property from hostile ex-Confederates and resettling elsewhere.

Battling Hunger

This chapter examines the basic necessity to eat as a crucial part of the larger struggle to survive wartime emancipation. Obtaining food and staving off hunger were not easily accomplished in a war and in a Union military sphere in which the army controlled the food supply. The chapter explores the issuance of army food rations, looking at the size, quality, and frequency of the rations for refugees, as well as the army’s effort to make sure that rations were only a temporary form of relief. Inadequate rations, coupled with a determination to feed themselves without the federal government’s intervention, then led refugees to forage and plant gardens and search for other ways of obtaining food on their own.

Confronting Removal

This chapter focuses on the relationship between race and space—between competing ideas for how people of different races should reside spatially—by looking at the Union army’s various attempts to remove refugees en masse. These removals attempted to resettle the people in places far removed from active combat, including northern states, islands in the Mississippi River, and even Haiti. Some of these efforts bore a great deal of resemblance to antebellum colonization plans, and, as in those cases, black men and women in the Civil War largely resisted being sent away. Most of the removals were justified by white officials in environmental terms, driven by racial ideologies that linked particular climates and landscapes to people of color. The chapter also argues that removals were sometimes triggered by concerns about gender and sex too—by beliefs that the physical proximity of black women and white men in military encampments had made rape inevitable.

Edward and Emma Whitehurst in Slavery

This interlude takes readers back into the antebellum period to understand what propelled Edward and Emma Whitehurst into Union lines in May 1861. It describes their lives in slavery, from Emma’s work as a field hand to Edward’s labor as a “hired-out” slave, a position that enabled them to save his wages in the hope of one day purchasing their freedom. It also narrates the arrival of war in their part of Newport News, Virginia, and the way in which planters in the region began leaving the area first. This opened up room for enslaved people like the Whitehursts to flee to Union lines beginning in mid-May, 1861.

Facing Combat

This chapter follows Eliza Bogan’s journey, and those of many thousands more, as they moved through the Mississippi River valley during the tumultuous years of 1863 and 1864. It begins with Bogan’s flight to the refugee camp in Helena, Arkansas, where her third husband, Silas Small, had gone to enlist in a regiment of the United States Colored Troops. But the upheaval of combat violence, especially during the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign, pushed Bogan and thousands of other refugees out of Helena and into other parts of the Mississippi River valley. The chapter then describes Bogan’s decision to join her husband’s regiment as a laundress and argues that positions like these opened up room for women in the Union army’s combat apparatus. This, along with the Union’s decision to resettle women and children on leased plantations in the region, as workers but also as occupiers of those plantations, reveals how deeply embedded all formerly enslaved people were in formal combat -- and in the Union army’s determined effort to defeat their former owners.

Finding Shelter

This chapter picks up with the situation in eastern Virginia and describes the importance of finding a place—a shelter—in the journey of a refugee from slavery. It begins with a discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation and its geography, paying particular attention to the places exempted from its reach, such as Fort Monroe, and Hampton, Virginia. It acknowledges that other policies already in place, such as the Confiscation Acts and especially a March 1862 article of war, still enabled people to flee to Union lines in some of the proclamation’s exempted regions. This meant, in turn, that finding a shelter, and thus a physical anchor, in Union lines was crucial to claiming freedom for any man, woman, or child. But the landscape of these shelters was uneven across the South, ranging from collections of cast-off army tents in some places, to formalized, planned settlements in others. The chapter analyzes these places as a cultural landscape of emancipation, arguing that these physical structures channeled into concrete form some of the more abstract ideas and beliefs about race, equality, freedom, and citizenship.

Gabriel Burdett in Slavery

This interlude returns to slavery and to the experience of Gabriel Burdett, an enslaved minister in Garrard County, Kentucky. It describes his struggle to preach freely and openly, including his conflict with the white elders of a local church who punished him for not following the dictates of proslavery Christianity. The interlude also discusses Burdett’s preferred form of antislavery Christianity, as well as the importance of religious faith to freedom-seeking people more generally.

Clothing Bodies

This chapter describes the clothing obtained and worn by the men, women, and children newly arrived in the war’s refugee camps. With little clothing accumulated during slavery, and with many stresses on that clothing during their journeys into the camps, the refugees had significant clothing needs. Men were usually issued military uniforms, either new ones for those who enlisted or used ones for those who worked as army laborers. But women and children had to rely on the clothing relief provided by missionaries and agents of other northern benevolent organizations. The chapter focuses on the issuance of that clothing relief and the ways in which white, northern relief workers tried to make it serve as a vehicle for preparing refugee women for freedom and citizenship. This occurred through the establishment of stores that would encourage good consumerism while limiting women’s choices to clothing that would mark their racial subordination. Black women, however, determined to wrest control of their bodies from white people, resisted many of these efforts and worked to dress themselves according to their own traditions and desires.

Epilogue

The epilogue follows Edward and Emma Whitehurst, Eliza Bogan, Gabriel Burdett, and their families well into the postwar period. It traces all of their efforts to acquire property and a livelihood that could support them for years to come. It follows Eliza Bogan’s journey in and out of sharecropping in Phillips County, Arkansas, as well as the Whitehursts’ eventual purchase of land in Virginia and Edward’s successful property claim filed with the Southern Claims Commission. It also describes Burdett’s entrance into Republican Party politics in Kentucky and his eventual migration, along with his family, to Kansas in the 1870s, in order to escape increasing racial violence in their home state. All of these individuals survived emancipation and the Civil War. But they also discovered that their time in the refugee camps was not an end but a beginning of what would become an extended pursuit of freedom well in the future.

Keeping Faith

This chapter follows Burdett, and many other enslaved people from Kentucky, into Camp Nelson, a Union supply depot that became a recruiting post for the United States Colored Troops. It emphasizes the constraints faced by those entering the camp in 1863 and 1864, especially due to its location in the Union slaveholding state of Kentucky, which was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation. Union officials proved more determined to limit the progress of emancipation in this state than in any other exempted region, leading to impressments of men and expulsions of women and children. But Gabriel Burdett still found a free space in which to begin preaching, and over time, with the assistance of missionaries like John Fee, he worked to establish a new school and an independent church at Camp Nelson. By 1865 the camp had become a place to seize and experience the religious freedom that enslaved people like Burdett had long imagined.