Troubled Refuge : Struggling For Freedom in the Civil War

Resource Information

The work Troubled Refuge : Struggling For Freedom in the Civil War represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Austin Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

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Label

Troubled Refuge : Struggling For Freedom in the Civil War

Title remainder

Struggling For Freedom in the Civil War

Statement of responsibility

Chandra Manning

Creator

• trueManning, Chandra

Author

• trueManning, Chandra

Subject

• 1861-1865
• African Americans -- Civil rights
• American Civil War (1861-1865)
• trueEnslaved people -- Emancipation
• trueFreed people
• trueFreed slaves
• History
• Slaves -- Emancipation
• Slaves -- Emancipation
• Slaves -- Emancipation -- United States
• Social aspects
• United States
• trueUnited States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- African Americans
• trueUnited States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Social aspects
• trueUnited States Civil War, 1861-1865
• African Americans
• trueAfrican American civil rights

Genre

• trueHistory

Language

eng

Summary

Even before shots were fired at Fort Sumter, slaves recognized that their bondage was at the root of the war, and they began running to the Union army. By the war's end, nearly half a million had taken refuge behind Union lines in improvised "contraband camps". These were crowded and dangerous places, with conditions approaching those of a humanitarian crisis, yet families and individuals took unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the first places where many Northerners would come to know former slaves en masse. Drawing on records of the Union and Confederate armies, the letters and diaries of soldiers, transcribed testimonies of former slaves, and more, Manning sweeps us along, from the contraband camps, sharing insight and stories of individuals and armies on the move, to debates in the halls of Congress. The alliances between former slaves and Union soldiers which were warily begun in the contraband camps would forge a dramatically new but highly imperfect alliance between the government and the African Americans. That alliance would outlast the war, and help destroy slavery and ward off the very acute and surprisingly tenacious danger of re-enslavement. It also raised, for the first time, humanitarian questions about refugees in wartime and legal questions about civil and military authority with which we still wrestle, as well as redefined American citizenship, to the benefit but also to the lasting cost of African Americans. --

Writing style

• trueRichly detailed

Assigning source

adapted from publisher website

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

973.7/11

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

LC call number

E453

LC item number

.M24 2016

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography