Embattled Freedom

Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps

By Amy Murrell Taylor

368 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 14 halftones, 8 maps, notes, bibl., index

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4362-5
    Published: November 2018
  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6159-9
    Published: August 2020
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-4363-2
    Published: October 2018
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5342-4
    Published: October 2018

Civil War America

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Awards & distinctions

2019 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

2019 Tom Watson Brown Book Award, Society of Civil War Historians

2019 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History, John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia

2019 Avery O. Craven Award, Organization of American Historians

2019 Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians

A 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Governor's Book Award, Kentucky Historical Society and the Office of the Governor

Theodore A. Hallam Book Award, University of Kentucky Department of History

Shortlisted, 2019 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award

The Civil War was just days old when the first enslaved men, women, and children began fleeing their plantations to seek refuge inside the lines of the Union army as it moved deep into the heart of the Confederacy. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more followed in a mass exodus from slavery that would destroy the system once and for all. Drawing on an extraordinary survey of slave refugee camps throughout the country, Embattled Freedom reveals as never before the everyday experiences of these refugees from slavery as they made their way through the vast landscape of army-supervised camps that emerged during the war. Amy Murrell Taylor vividly reconstructs the human world of wartime emancipation, taking readers inside military-issued tents and makeshift towns, through commissary warehouses and active combat, and into the realities of individuals and families struggling to survive physically as well as spiritually. Narrating their journeys in and out of the confines of the camps, Taylor shows in often gripping detail how the most basic necessities of life were elemental to a former slave's quest for freedom and full citizenship.

The stories of individuals--storekeepers, a laundress, and a minister among them--anchor this ambitious and wide-ranging history and demonstrate with new clarity how contingent the slaves' pursuit of freedom was on the rhythms and culture of military life. Taylor brings new insight into the enormous risks taken by formerly enslaved people to find freedom in the midst of the nation’s most destructive war.

About the Author

Amy Murrell Taylor is T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and author of The Divided Family in Civil War America.
For more information about Amy Murrell Taylor, visit the Author Page.

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Multimedia & Links

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Taylor talks to Adam McNeil for the New Books Network podcast. (05/29/2019, running time 01:01:33)