The Refugee Crisis in the American Civil War

Abstract

The Refugee Crisis in the American Civil War Lorien Foote (bio) handra Manning. Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. 396 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. David Silkenat. Driven from Home: North Carolina's Civil War Refugee Crisis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. viii + 290 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95. During the American Civil War, hundreds of thousands of southerners—black and white, men and women, old and young, rich and poor—fled their homes. Refugees outnumbered the men who served in the Confederate Army, and by the war's end, between 12–15% of the U.S. slave population lived in contraband camps. Their precipitate movement created a refugee crisis on a scale that historians are just now coming to appreciate. Two excellent works by Chandra Manning and David Silkenat, especially when read in tandem, provide scholars with a better understanding of the refugee experience and the political, military, and social consequences of their actions. Manning focuses solely on African Americans in the contraband camps of the Union Army, but provides a sweeping national picture of the camps and the process of emancipation, while Silkenat explores the full diversity of the refugee experience within a single southern state, North Carolina, whose interior location made it a destination for refugees from across the Confederacy. These books will change how scholars conceptualize the Civil War home front and the dynamics of population movement during the conflict. In addition, historians will benefit from considering how these authors balance the role of individual agency with the role of structural conditions in the story they have to tell. Silkenat's Driven From Home compares five different streams of refugees and locates fugitive slaves within a complex and far-reaching refugee crisis. Whereas previous scholarship considers African Americans in isolation, Silkenat effectively demonstrates that studying the full variety of refugee movements "illuminates dynamics between them that have remained invisible when looking at them individually (p. 4)." The distinct refugee groups in North Carolina were the African Americans and white Unionists who fled to Union [End Page 451] lines in the eastern part of the state after Gen. Ambrose Burnside's invasion of February 1862; white Confederates who sought safety in central North Carolina from Union military operations in other states; slaves moved to the central and western regions of the state from other parts of the Confederacy to keep them from running away and to put them to work; and young women sent to boarding schools to keep them out of harm's way. The African American refugee stream moving east to Union lines created the stream that moved west because runaways prompted masters to relocate slaves in vast numbers. Silkenat's conclusions regarding the situation for African Americans in Union-occupied eastern North Carolina matches the finding of Manning for those "exiting slavery" across the South. A complex interaction between the U.S. Army, U.S. government officials, northern philanthropic workers, and refugees, all of whom had different priorities, shaped conditions in contraband camps and the experiences of its occupants. Both external structural forces, such as location and the outcome of nearby battles, and individual agency, particularly the attitudes of army personnel, mattered to the quality and longevity of a camp. Northern philanthropists and military officials believed that government aid fostered dependence; this widespread assumption governed their response to the refugee crisis. In eastern North Carolina, the Union Army welcomed fugitives from slavery and issued general orders that instituted free labor, provided rations to children, and acknowledged African-American parents' legal claim to their children. Military officials saw refugees as a labor pool, civilian relief workers were primarily interested in meeting spiritual and physical needs, and the refugees desired education and autonomous communities. Because President Lincoln hoped to return eastern North Carolina to civilian government as quickly as possible, he appointed Edward Stanly as military governor, who sought to enforce antebellum slave laws and break apart refugee communities. The resulting conflict between Stanly and the military, and the departure of aid workers who advocated for them, left the refugees in limbo for months. After the Emancipation Proclamation...