Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

Abstract

Among the most contentious political issues today is the status of war refugees. Most Americans assume that this is a twentieth-century issue—tragic, albeit peripheral—that was the inevitable result of modern warfare. In Troubled Refuge Chandra Manning demonstrates that refugees were central to the course and consequence of the nineteenth-century Civil War. Civil War refugees have been studied, but scholars and others used the term refugees to describe Southern whites fleeing advancing armies. In memory, formerly enslaved Americans retained the dubious but legally correct (in 1861) status as contrabands, not refugees. Regardless of the appellation or the term, understanding former slaves' actions as refugees remains central to how modern scholars assess the evolution of the Civil War from a war for union to a war for freedom—the end of slavery and the realization of emancipation. Manning's award-winning study What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (2007) examined soldiers' evolving views of emancipation, which she asserts was central to what they believed the war was about. Her current study documents the conscious efforts of the formerly enslaved to change these white soldiers' views. Manning explains that “this book is an extended meditation on the tension between structure and agency in the wartime destruction of slavery in the United States” (p. 10). Slavery ended because of formerly enslaved individuals' “courage determination and resilience”; however, none of this would have mattered because “sometimes immense structural forces—like firepower and state power—overcome people, no matter how resolute their will” (ibid.). In her view, black refugees allied with the army and the federal government, allowing them to achieve their goals. While scholars usually summarize these goals as emancipation and citizenship, Manning's nuanced analysis of citizenship demonstrates that refugees' push was not about political rights but about “autonomy for themselves, their loved ones and their communities” (p. 14).