Our host, John Heckman, talks with historian Amy Murrell Taylor about the experiences of those who escaped slavery during the Civil War, the role the Union army played in the process, and the establishment of “contraband” camps.
Transcript
John Heckman: In 2019, we talked about your book Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War Slave Refugee Camps. And, I would love to just start there and ask, what was the inspiration for writing that book?
Amy Murrell Taylor: Well, I have been studying the Civil War for a couple decades at least. And it’s not that there was one moment that set me down the road to writing that book. But there were a number of moments—and one important one was a photograph, which I wish could show to listeners right now. It’s a photograph of a family and some Union soldiers and a wagon and they’re in Virginia in the middle of the war. It’s a black family, appears to be an extended family. And they’re clearly on the move and going somewhere. Yet, there are soldiers all around them. And, it’s one of the most compelling photos. It’s one of those ones that you just keep coming back and looking at and trying to understand what is the story of this photograph.

In this August 1862 photo by Timothy O’Sullivan, a group of African-American refugees crosses the Rappahannock River in search of the safety of Union lines.
And what I realized is that I could not figure out the story of the photo just by looking at it. Because in all those years of studying the Civil War I hadn’t—historians, others hadn’t—really excavated this story of wartime emancipation, African American history in the war. Emancipation was something told as it came on January 1, 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation and hallelujah, freedom had come in this very linear, clean, neat story.
That didn’t explain to me why this family was on the move. Where were they going? What were they thinking about? What were the soldiers doing all around them? So, to make a long story short, I realized there was more to the story of emancipation than I knew. And that really sent me digging.
And I did find that there were some other historians out there who had been telling this history. They just have not gotten some of the attention and exposure. Some of them were black historians writing at the turn of the century, turned to the 20th century. Robert Engs, another African-American historian at Penn, who wrote a book about Eastern Virginia during the war.
So, I was able to draw on some previous work, but still realize there was a lot more that needed to be done.
John Heckman: Do you think this kind of work was really influenced by the fact that when we think culturally about freedom and the Emancipation Proclamation a lot of people really gravitate toward the Underground Railroad history and that once you go to a certain place you’re free and everything’s great. And now that the Emancipation Proclamation has come about everything’s great as long as the Union army is there. Do you think it’s that kind of cultural idea of when something happens it happens in full and there’s not really a challenge occurring?
Amy Murrell Taylor: I think so. And I think that’s especially acute with freedom, with the history of freedom in this country. I think we do tend to mythologize it as this very clear, tangible state of being that you can just step into one day and then you experience it in full.
And the reality is—and I guess this is why I titled my book along these lines—that freedom is actually something that you kind of step into and then have to continue fighting for. And continue fighting to realize what it should mean. I call it an “Embattled Freedom” in my book title.
I think that we do have a deeply ingrained idea of what freedom is in our country that doesn’t quite fit with the reality of our history.
John Heckman: And it goes way back to the founding of the nation, where it wasn’t that clean and, you know, 1784, 1785, it wasn’t that way.
Amy Murrell Taylor: No, not at all.
John Heckman: When did the U.S. government in particular realize that they had to do something to have camps for these folks who are newly free, if you will, and seeking this idea of freedom and whatever that may be to each individual? When did the government really realize they had something to do here to make their lives a little bit better?
Amy Murrell Taylor: Well, some people in the government—and particularly we’re talking about the army here—realized it within weeks of the start of the war. But by no means did that mark a consensus among those in the federal government that something needed to be done. So, this would remain a pretty contested thing among politicians and military leaders. What should the government do for the people?
But those who realized it right away, realized it because of the actions of those who were enslaved. And that’s a really important part of this story here. That Fort Sumter falls and within days, enslaved people are fleeing to Union army lines to places like Fort Pickens, Florida; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Fort Monroe, Virginia. And they’re the ones that even make this something that federal officials need to think about. If they had not fled, if they had not pushed this question, then those federal officials, they wouldn’t have woken up one day and said, Hey, you know what? We should create a refuge for people who want to get out of slavery.
It wouldn’t have happened. It needed the actions of enslaved people themselves. And so that’s a critical part of that early story.
John Heckman: How did these camps evolve from a center of people just to come together to small towns? Did they start in like one building in particular in a town? Or did they start as camps? How did these things begin and evolve?
Amy Murrell Taylor: I could give you a really evasive answer and just say, well, it was different in every place, which was true. But there are some patterns. And I think what people need to keep in mind is that over the course of the war, at least 500,000 people probably fled slavery.
I think it’s actually more, but that’s the best estimate that we have. And clearly, it’s not just men who flee and then go enlist in the army. It includes them, but it’s a lot of women, children, elderly people, disabled people. People who need to get rooted somewhere and have some physical protection and live somewhere.
So, there is a general life cycle that begins to form. People start arriving in Union lines. And Union officials, some of them don’t want them there, but some do. And those who do tend to provide tents, maybe access to lumber to build some rough housing. And so general encampments start to form that look a lot like a soldier’s encampment, really.
But then, depending on where a camp is, if it’s in a place that’s not very close to military action, to active campaigns and battles, they’ve got a little more protected space to begin imagining a future on this ground and turning those camps into something that looks more like a town or a village—with more permanent housing, schools, churches, roads, hospital, things like that. Other places, though, that are still in close proximity to active violence and active fighting, those are ones that tend to stay rough, more like encampments, because they probably are going to have to pick up and move in response to the movement of troops.
So, it does vary from place to place. But in those places that become more like towns, they really become the foundation for new free towns. And residents in them begin to imagine that this might be where they stay even after this war is over. And that this is their new home. And I think one of the most interesting examples of that is the one that emerged in Arlington, Virginia.
To hear Arlington, you think National Cemetery. If you know a little deeper Civil War history, you know this is the land of Robert E. Lee and his family. And there on Lee’s land in Arlington emerges a place called Freedman’s Village. There are some photographs of the village out there with some two-story homes, parks. Really starts to look like a new free town, which is a really fascinating transformation in just a couple of years.

A wartime photograph shows African-American adults and children reading books while lined up in front of a barracks-like building at Freedman’s Village in Arlington, Virginia.
John Heckman: From those early days—1861, 1862 forward—do we see an explosion of the population of these persons coming into Union lines? Or is it basically just similar in number and scope because of the advancing army?
Amy Murrell Taylor: What you just said is really the answer here.
It’s really more of a military story than a political one. Or another way to put it is the inclination of people to flee is determined more by military actions and movement and presence than it is by actions of political leaders. At least that’s what I found. So, it’s really about being in proximity of U.S. forces, of knowing where they are, of being able to get there. That’s going to determine whether somebody flees or not. And so, really what happens over the course of the war is as you see the U.S. Army moving, if you follow some of those maps of occupation and how they show how occupation changes over time, that is the same basic footprint of where people are fleeing and when.
So, January 1, 1863, when the proclamation takes root—and that really means when it takes effect—it’s a very important moment. And I don’t mean to downplay it. But it’s not important because it leads to a mass flight of people. It’s more important because those people who are fleeing now have more confidence in that U.S. government—that it is now committed to emancipation. And that is why some of them begin celebrating January 1 in 1864, 1865.
John Heckman: I’ve often wondered about my Union ancestors. There was probably some racism going on in that army, but it seemed like there were different levels of racism—I hate to put it like that, but that’s how I see it—where you have a racist who would say in the Union army, yeah, I’m racist, but I don’t believe in this and we need to get these folks out of here. We see that time to time, right, with some of the officer corps in the Union army, where they don’t want to do certain things for these formerly enslaved people, but they have this idea that it’s a war measure. If we can take the people away who are building the entrenchments for the Confederates, all the better. This kind of change in scope as the war drags on is really intriguing to me as far as the mentality of ending slavery and the explosion of the camp system, to give these people a chance or at least house them in a local area. Did you see that with some of the officers or some of the federal enlisted men, where the mindset changed and they go in with one idea and then they’re like, okay, I may not see these people as equal to me, sadly. But they don’t deserve this.
Amy Murrell Taylor: Boy, that is such a good question. You know, the army, the way I started to think about it, it’s just a collection of individuals. And some of them come in to this war more abolitionist minded, and some come into this war, they’re literally from the South, some of them fighting in the U.S. Army. Some of them come in, though, entirely sympathetic with the interests of southern slaveowners. Maybe not entirely, but somewhat. So, it’s really hard to start generalizing about the officer corps or about Union soldiers and what their views of emancipation are.
Now, first, we need to qualify that we’re talking about the white soldiers and officers here. Yes, there are some who evolve. There are some men who come from some remote town in New Hampshire or Vermont that is 99 percent white before the Civil War, who have basically never seen a person of color. Never related with them. Nothing like that. There are documented cases of men like that who then come South and are exposed to not just slavery, but enslaved people and people of African descent for the first time. And some of them do write back in a pretty condescending, patronizing sort of way about, Oh, they’re actually kind of smart. They’re really good people.
So, yeah, they’re having an awakening of sorts, but it’s maybe not exactly the one we would hope for them. But we can see them bringing those racist assumptions in. We see others though, who don’t change. And I think what’s important to see and to distinguish is that even though some of these men get on board with ending slavery, ending the system of slavery is a very different thing from integrating people of African descent as equals into society and into the citizenry. And many of these men don’t get on board with that. And so, we can see that in their policies, even as they are providing refuge to people fleeing slavery because they know this is going to destroy the South. This is going to destroy slavery. They don’t necessarily want to see them setting up schools. They don’t necessarily want to see all of them fighting in a United States uniform. They don’t necessarily want to see a lot of those markers of equality.
So, this is kind of a long-winded response to your question. But I think that’s because it is such a complex situation. Maybe one way to tidy this up is that the war and the encounters of the U. S. Army with enslaved people and slavery does open up many people’s minds. White people are becoming a little more self-conscious of their views of slavery and race. Doesn’t necessarily lead them to the outcome that we want them to go.
John Heckman: Yeah. And hindsight is a wonderful thing, where we can look ahead to Reconstruction and see how some lessons were not learned the way we would have hoped they would have been learned.

Two African-American men, hired as servants by officers of the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry, are shown in an army camp near Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864.
Amy Murrell Taylor: Right. Well, there’s some documented cases of some really horrific acts on the part of U.S. soldiers towards enslaved people. And there’s some good research going on right now. There is a historian at Albion College, Marcy Sacks, who writes about how some of these northern soldiers like the idea of a racial hierarchy that they’re experiencing in the South. That they can hire a black person to be their personal servant. And maybe, sort of, accepting the basic idea of a racial hierarchy in a way that in their all-white towns back in the North, they hadn’t even really ever had to test and think about. So, it’s complex.
One more thing I’ll add is that it’s not just individual men that we need to look at when we think about the army and race and slavery. Army orders and policies and federal policies also get created during the war that create some systemic inequalities too. Even as they’re liberating people, they are doing it in a way that structures a racial inequality. One example I can throw out there. This is 1864 in the Mississippi Valley and the U.S. Army now is occupying all of this land. And now the U.S. government wants to see cotton growing again on that land. That’s good for the economy. It’s good for the United States, they reason. And so how are they going to get these people who fled slavery to go back to plantations and cultivate this cotton? Well, they start leasing out the plantations, leasing them out to people who had demonstrated they’re loyal to the United States.
They might be a white southerner, a black southerner, or a white northerner—a white northerner who we would come to call a carpetbagger. And basically, they create a system where refugees from slavery go back onto these plantations. They will be paid their promised payment. So that is, in their minds, the reason why this is not slavery. But they also institute really exploitative labor policies. Really hard labor. Really harsh labor. In some places they don’t have access to the schooling they had access to in a refugee camp. They’re really made to live and do exactly what they did as enslaved people, but now for the benefit of the U.S. government. And so, you can see in policies like that, there’s an assumption of inequality baked into the wartime policy.
And so, that makes this moment really important, too, in understanding the long-term history of race and inequality in this country.
John Heckman: And it really underscores the debate that we have as historians of what does someone mean by the term freedom? It’s different for everyone in certain cases. And the path to get there is much different for everyone, because everyone has a different idea.
Amy Murrell Taylor: Well, and it also suggests we shouldn’t conflate emancipation and freedom. So, emancipation is the act of being liberated from the situation of enslavement, from the position of enslavement. Being legally recognized as free. But then freedom itself is that state, that status that one moves into. And there aren’t a lot of the automatic protections that one might assume that a person would receive in freedom. And so, men, women, and children fleeing slavery in the war really have to look out for themselves, fight for themselves, really assert themselves to have any kind of meaningful freedom.
John Heckman: Well, that’s a great segue into a question I thought of earlier. What are some of the strategies that either the men or the women in these camps are employing to try to survive? Are they finding employment in some way? Are they doing some other kind of work to try to make a better life for themselves or those around them?
William Headly, who escaped slavery from plantation near Raleigh, North Carolina, in a photo taken shortly after he reached Union lines. A photographer’s note says that Headly’s “clothes were of many colors and qualities … [and his] cloak consisted of an old cotton grain bag, slit open on one side.”Library of Congress
They’ve really got to create a situation that protects a family, not just from the weather and from the climate and everything like that, but provides them with a little bit of privacy and even allows them to hide a little bit in some places where there are Confederate guerrillas roaming around.
So, food, clothing, and shelter is number one. But to sustain that, number two is finding a means of making money, of receiving compensation for one’s labor for the first time in their lives. And so often what individuals will do is appeal to the U.S. Army. I can cook, I can be a laundress, I can do physical labor, help build roads—military roads—dig ditches, build fortifications, all of this. And with the expectation that the army would pay them. And that becomes a whole story in and of itself, because most of the time the army promises wages because nobody would take that job if they didn’t. But the army was not consistent in following through on actually paying wages, and that becomes a real problem.
That’s really all the beginning when it comes to simply surviving into freedom: food, clothing, shelter, and then money, which is going to then ensure that they can continue to eat and potentially build a better home and so forth. Beyond that, there’s so many other elements of survival. That piece of physical protection becomes really important in some places. Not many people fleeing slavery could rely on the U.S. Army to always be there—and always be there to protect them. The army is getting called away. The army isn’t always even consistent in the protection it wants to provide to the refugees.
And these camps become a target for Confederates. I can’t stress enough how precarious their situation was and how dangerous their situation was in places like the Mississippi Valley, where Confederate guerrillas are roaming, particularly 1863, but especially 1864 and early 1865. And it’s a pretty scary thing. So, survival involves being on the watch. It may involve figuring out a way to arm oneself. It may also be picking up and fleeing and constantly being on the move to find a place where they could safely settle.
So, survival is really the number one focus and consideration of people fleeing slavery. And it’s something that few people made it to a point where they didn’t have to worry so much about survival. It was a pretty enduring focus and challenge for the rest of the war.
John Heckman: That makes me wonder if there were any long-term effects on these families, like their psyche or something like that, because maybe they didn’t feel like they were protected enough or maybe they felt like they had to protect themselves more.
Did you see any of those kinds of issues, where there was a long-term side effect of being in these camps?
Amy Murrell Taylor: That’s a huge question. An important one. One I did not fully figure out, because many of the people I studied, I followed them into the future, but it became more and more difficult to trace their everyday life and to know what’s happening internally. I think that for a historian is always a challenge. How do you understand the emotional, psychological impact of what people are living through? And they don’t always tell us.
And they don’t have the same language that we do today to describe what they’re going through. So how do we know? Well, we can surmise based on what we know today about trauma and about the psychology of trauma. And I can say, factually, that these are people who experienced trauma on the road to freedom. Varying degrees; some more than others. But, to see a family member dying from malnutrition because they couldn’t make it. To see another family member carried away by Confederate guerrillas. To witness some of the things that anybody witnesses in a war is a very traumatic thing.
It had to have stayed with them emotionally throughout the rest of their lives. How that played into how they lived their lives, the choices they made, those dots I couldn’t quite connect. What I could see, though, is that when the war ends, they weren’t on this firm foundation of freedom, and it was an upward trajectory of their lives from there on out.
It was a very difficult road for these families continuing to have the economic financial foundation they needed to live well, or to even just live, bringing their families together or keeping them together. Many of them had been separated by war. A man who had enlisted in the army and was sent off. In other ways, people were separated, bringing them back together. The fight to continue to realize the full meaning of freedom just continues in some tangible ways.
And many try to become landowners and that becomes a really difficult thing when white southerners are back in power in the Reconstruction South and are making it incredibly difficult for them to do so. So that’s a long, windy answer to your question. Although I think the question of the emotional impact is a really good one. And there’s a new book by Kidada Williams about terror and violence in Reconstruction. And she tries to probe the trauma of living through Reconstruction violence and does a really incredible job of thinking about what we know about trauma today and really helping to understand what people went through. And I think a lot of what her insights are in that book could be applied to the Civil War too.
John Heckman: The other question I had about the camps themselves was, did some of them become permanent places for people to reside? Obviously, Arlington was built up in different ways over time and some of these camps were I’m sure meant to be just temporary and moved. But some of them were built up pretty much because, as you say, they had churches and things like that.
Did any of them lay the foundation for any kind of a permanent town? Or did people just go their own ways when the war was over and look for family? Or is the wrong question to ask simply because it’s different for everybody?
Amy Murrell Taylor: No, but I’m going to give you one of these waffly academic answers, which is the answer is yes and no.
Here’s the no. The reason why in a lot of ways this did not become the foundation of future towns and villages and something more permanent: This whole refugee story is wrapped up and dependent on U.S. control of land in the South.
Over the course of the war, the U.S. Army occupies over 800,000 acres of land. So that makes possible the emergence of these camps. So, then the question at the end of the war is, well, is the U.S. government going to continue to hold on to that land, or is it going to give it back to its antebellum white southern owners? If the U.S. government gives it back, then all of these camps have to disappear.
So, this is the question, and the short answer is that the U.S. government ultimately decides, no, the land is going to go back to its antebellum owners. This is something that is the subject of a big fight in Congress. Radical Republicans, they want to take the land. They want to see it carved up in 40-acre plots and redistributed to formerly enslaved people. It seems like, to them, a right. It seems like also almost a form of reparations for slavery. But, the Radicals on this question are a minority. And particularly with the ascendance of Andrew Johnson into the presidency, who is far more sympathetic with the interests of white southerners, ultimately, the U.S. government does not hold on to this land.
And so, what happens is we have these pretty terrible scenes of U.S. officials, members of the army, the new Freedmen’s Bureau, going into some of these camps and evicting everybody and forcing them to tear down homes and destroy what they had been building. So, there’s a really, in some ways, terrible end to the story. We want to see that the experience of refugees began this kind of linear process to this wonderful achievement of freedom. That’s the American story. But instead, it gets stopped in its tracks. Right there. And it’s over the course of just 1865 and 1866.
Now, the reason I said yes to that question is there are some exceptions. There are some places where the land does not revert back. Two very conspicuous examples are Arlington and Freedman’s Village—Robert E. Lee’s land—and also some of the land in Mississippi owned by the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. So, in two places where the U.S. government is more inclined to punish the antebellum landowner, the camps did stay. There’s a long, complicated history of both. Eventually, the Arlington Freeman’s Village did shut down by the early 20th century, but it did last for a while.
I’ll just add one other little point to this question, though, that I don’t want to imply that those who fled slavery were back to square one when all of this land reverts back to the landowners. Because they had formed communities. And those communities maybe didn’t have a physical space anymore, but they had relationships and networks. They had formed churches. They had congregations that they had formed. They had schools that they had formed. They had teachers. And so, some of this migrates into cities or they migrate to other places where they might get access to purchase a small acreage of land.
So, some of the relationships and networks survive at the end of the war and do become the foundation of new communities. Just not in the same place where they had been.
John Heckman: I have one final question for you. What do you think the legacy of these kinds of camps are, when we still discuss people who are fleeing from violent places around the world or migration in general? What do you think are the lessons from this kind of work—or the legacy from these kinds of histories?
Amy Murrell Taylor: When I’ve given talks on this subject, people seem most surprised that the United States had experienced a refugee crisis in its history. We tend to think of this as something that happens elsewhere in the rest of the world. We don’t think about Americans getting displaced and uprooted.
We might talk about indigenous people and their removal and their expulsion. But generally, this kind of thing doesn’t seem American in many people’s minds. So, I think one thing about this history is it does complicate some of our conceptions of ourselves as Americans. Of what it has taken to live up to our principles of freedom and equality.
I think, most importantly, it illuminates what a fight it has been to extend the principles of freedom and equality to all people. And not just a fight, but how uneven or incomplete a fight it has been. I think that is something that people often are really struck by because, again, the mythology we have is that there was a grand triumph of freedom in this war and it came in the Emancipation Proclamation, very neatly and cleanly overnight.
This history completely demolishes that. It shows that enslaved people really literally had to fight. It shows what a struggle it was. And it shows that there wasn’t even a complete achievement of that freedom by the end of the war. So, I think it helps to demystify our history. Blow open some of those mythologies and therefore hopefully make us a little more open to asking harder questions about where we are today and how we got there. And to not rely on the simple stories.
About the Guest
Amy Murrell Taylor is the T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and author most recently of Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (2018).
Additional Resources
- Robert F. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (1979)
- Albion College historian Marcy Sacks
- Kidada Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction (2023)
- For more on our host, John Heckman, visit him on Linktree