Description:
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.
Brief description:
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.
Review Quotes:
"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