Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. By Amy Murrell Taylor

Abstract

Over the past decade, Civil War historians have debated the so-called “dark turn” in the field as studies of the war’s intended and unintended consequences on the lives of soldiers and civilians alike have challenged the conventional narratives of the Civil War as “a new birth of freedom” (as Abraham Lincoln had declared in the Gettysburg Address). Some scholars, such as Jim Downs, Thavolia Glymph, and Gretchen Long, have argued that while the military may have driven the final nail in slavery’s coffin, historians have overlooked the limitations of military emancipation and the ways that enslaved people struggled to survive in southern war zones plagued by violence and disease. Others believe that a focus on the wartime struggles of enslaved people has resulted in an overly negative perception of the Union Army and reveals an essential lack of understanding about how the army functions. As Gary Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier wrote in the Journal of the Civil War Era in December 2014, “military history has become more diluted and orientated toward the oppressed and damaged, appearing more palatable but also requiring less expertise in actual military institutions and their histories” (492).