Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps

"This book won more prizes than any other book about the Civil War that I know of. Full disclosure, Amy is a former student of mine. The subtitle of Embattled Freedom is Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps . Amy recovered the stories of people fleeing slavery for the protection of the United States Army, with an uncertain future before them. She shows us that two years before the Emancipation Proclamation, enslaved people were risking everything to make themselves free. This moves us from a story where freedom is bestowed on people to a story where freedom is seized by people in slavery. There’s no doubt that white Southerners went to war to create a new nation in which slavery would not be challenged. But, at the beginning, white Northerners were not going to war to end the system of slavery. In the beginning of the war, that goal seemed impossible. Slavery accounted for 80% of all American exports. What happens is Lincoln comes to recognize that he can’t defeat the South without defeating slavery. And, as you just suggested, it’s also the case that many Northerners, who had not had contact with Black Southerners, came to know them in these camps and came to see their determination to be free and their capacity for freedom, their hunger for literacy and their resourcefulness. So the refugees helped make emancipation a war aim and prepared the United States to embrace that aim. One of the most astounding things in American history was that Abraham Lincoln was able to persuade the white North to go along with expanding the purpose of the war from putting the United States back together to ending slavery."