Embattled Freedom

In 1943 Bell Irvin Wiley's The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy revolutionized Civil War military history by focusing on the hundreds of thousands of men who fought in the ranks, rather than just the generals who gave the orders. Three-quarters of a century later, Amy Murrell Taylor's Embattled Freedom carries the revolution a long-overdue step further by drawing our attention to the half million people who became refugees from slavery during the war. Like Wiley's “common soldiers,” these refugees occupied a critical part of the Civil War landscape, but they appear in traditional histories only as a faceless collective, often metamorphized into floods, torrents, or rising tides. Taylor begins the task of untangling their individual stories and explaining how they lived day to day during their perilous journeys out of enslavement and toward an uncertain future. Uncertainty is the watchword of the book. In 1861, there was no plan or precedent for dismantling the South's system of forced labor, and no such plan ever developed. Taylor shows how the process was instead shaped primarily by military necessity, as determined by officers of the armies of the United States, both on the ground and in Washington, D.C. This includes the familiar story of Union general Benjamin Butler's contrabands (a term Taylor eschews in favor of the more accurate and evocative refugees to describe the men, women, and children who left the sites of their enslavement in search of freedom) but goes far beyond it. At times, Union military goals were congruent with increased freedom and autonomy, as in 1863 when federal authorities moved families from temporary camps and settled them on a series of plantations along the Mississippi, where their presence on abandoned land was intended to create a military buffer against Confederate guerilla activity. At other times, however, the harsh demands of war caused officers to order the destruction of homes, gardens, and businesses that newly freed people had painstakingly built up over months or even years of labor. Whether they served as soldiers, migrated toward Union armies seeking food and shelter, or were displaced by those same armies in the name of military necessity, refugees from slavery found themselves literally embattled on their painful and often-fatal journeys toward freedom

Political science · Refugee · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American History and Culture · Cuban History and Society · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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