Embattled Freedom

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.

Reviews

"Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, Taylor's book offers the reader a vivid and convincing narrative of these slave refugee camps as 'an elemental part of the story of slavery's destruction in the United States,' one that deserves a broad readership among not only Civil War enthusiasts but anyone interested in the history of race and slavery in the United States."—Publishers Weekly

"Deeply researched and imaginatively framed, Embattled Freedom offers a fresh perspective on the role of the U.S. military in shaping the lived experience of freedom for the half a million enslaved people in the Confederacy, as well as the determination of those people to make meaningful the promises Lincoln spoke of in 1863. Most importantly, her feeling for her subjects, people typically considered collateral damage by many military historians, allows Taylor to write a truly human history of warfare guided by the hopes, fears, and losses of the men, women, and children the Union Army ostensibly aimed to liberate. In short, Embattled Freedom is a profound meditation on the nature of warfare and its relation to freedom and citizenship. Amy Murrell Taylor demonstrates not only her expertise as a military and social historian but also her skill as a thinker and writer. This book is a model for scholars and students alike."—Journal of Southern History

"A compelling account of how African American refugees' search for freedom pushed the nation toward abolition. . . . Taylor meticulously recovers the history of these erased settlements and the African American lives transformed therein. . . . An essential text for scholars and nonacademics alike."—Journal of the Civil War Era

"Taylor has written perhaps the single-most evocative portrayal of wartime refugees in the field's distinguished history. . . . In patient, concrete prose, and by 'slowing down the pace of the traditional emancipation narrative,' Taylor elicits not just sympathy or terror or excitement but genuine suspense."—Reviews in American History

"Converts a triumphalist tale of enslavement ended by emancipation into a more realistic one of an ongoing journey toward a contingent and uncertain freedom that was far from complete in 1865."—Journal of American History

"Taylor has written perhaps the single-most evocative portrayal of wartime refugees in the field's distinguished history. Her book is one of the best briefs for material culture that I have ever read. Our eyes almost see what the freedpeople saw; our hands seem to be touching the goods they handled, bought, sold, hammered, ate, and hid; our bodies almost feel the protection of homes and churches as they are constructed and we almost hear the calls of prayer and song, and at least hear, too, the silence when the Army orders the destruction of those homes and churches after Confederate surrender. In patient, concrete prose, and by 'slowing down the pace of the traditional emancipation narrative,' Taylor elicits not just sympathy or terror or excitement but genuine suspense.'."—Reviews in American History