Book Project in Progress

• Enslaved people did more than pray for emancipation. They conjured it. 

• This is a cultural history of Black self-emancipation. 

  • It details the culmination of African diasporic knowledge and practices that made modern freedom in the United States during a Civil War.

•  African folk culture rose up as a potent grassroots force in shaping emancipation communities.  

  • As the Civil War set African Americans in motion, new configurations of people gathered together to build networks of trust.  

  • To do this, they shared in ritual practices that were both a continuation of resistance known in slavery and something wholly new. 

  • Black refugees built solidarity among scarcity and conflict. They put forth visions for reordering post-slavery society in ways quite distinct from that imagined by Union agents.  

  • Black folk practices were not incidental to their experience of freedom but were central in its making.  

• The refugee camps of the American Civil War era are fitting places to investigate the process of trust-building and solidarity-making among African Tucked into the nooks of the bureaucratic records of wartime refugee camps are flashes of evidence illuminating how black folk culture played an integral role in enslaved people’s construction and realization of freedom for themselves and their families.

  • • Putting these records in conversation African American testimony, archaeological excavations, and scholarship on the African diaspora can illuminate a moment of unique possibility in between slavery and freedom. 

  • Categorized as "contraband" property deemed neither fully enslaved nor fully free, African Americans held power not in spite of their liminal position but because of it. 

  • In an unsettled landscape, refugee spaces were ripe as laboratories for Black imaginings of new order. 

  • Black refugees persevered despite America’s ambivalence toward their belonging. They forced answers to political questions long feared and avoided. The courage to address those questions came from people long marginalized and underestimated.  

  • Refugees did not own property. Yet they occupied space. They had no rights the state recognized. Yet they carved out autonomies.

• From 1861 to 1865, around one million African Americans came into refugee spaces—about 660,000 came into Union camps.  About 100,000 more gathered in "gypsy camps," "tent cities," and "shanty towns" outside of secure Union jurisdiction.  About 100,000 more stayed on or took up residence on farms and plantations abandoned by fleeing Confederates.  More sought refuge elsewhere. An estimated 50,000 became wartime maroons in the swamps and hills of environmental shelter.  And then there were the estimated 200,000-plus Black southerners who were forced southward during the war, many of whom gathered in "slave refugee camps" on Confederate frontiers.  These numbers represent snapshots of what the documentary record was able to capture of people on the move among a population of 4.2 million African Americans in the South.  

  • From all night meetings to ring shouts, from Bible readings divining how the “King of the North” would overcome to improvised freedom songs, Black Americans forged freedom’s meaning together. 

  • They gathered not only to soothe their souls in a trying time but also to influence directly and immediately the outcome of their lives and the war.     

Links to SECTIONS:

Conversations

Portents

Watermelon Vines

Shoes

"The fusion of Bostonian conventional literacy with African diasporic practice could become a mighty weapon in an abolitionist arsenal.  Yet Union deficits in comprehending conjure culture would draw limits around what kind of equality could be imagined and pursued."  

1. August 1865 a revival in a black soldiers’ camp leads to the court-martial of the revival leader who "was struck with the Power.” 

2. In this chapter, the “cross” from the song referenced in the title “Am I a Soldier of the Cross” (sung in black soldier recruitment rallies) assumes heightened ambiguity and gives me an opportunity to probe the dual identities of citizenship and community for African Americans during this time. 

3. These identities coalesced in 1863 and competed in 1865 in the two scenes I narrate, mirroring change over time during the Civil War era.

4. This chapter builds the story of how black religion went from being a tool the Union army favored to a form they feared for its radical potential.

5. Black soldiers come into view in this chapter as refugees, as characters connected to community understandings this book has taken seriously but that military membership often misunderstood or punished, even as black alliances with the Union had created new opportunities. 

6. This perspective reconceptualizes the soldier-to-citizen narrative of black freedom to reckon more completely with the ways African Americans came to terms with becoming part of the nation that had enslaved their families for generations.

·       Reversing a River's Purpose ("Away I Goin' to Find My Mamma")

o   Rivers had been the main arteries of the slave trade, precipitating family separations.

o   The war changed that. To find the rendezvous points for reunion, refugees followed the water.

o   The Union control of the Mississippi River not only facilitated a military supply line.

o   It reversed the most likely purpose for a black person going “down river.”

o   Once to be sold, now to get to those sold. African Americans reversed the river’s purpose.

o   Mary’s journey took her to frontiers where slavery was supposed to continue in perpetuity.

o   Instead, these frontiers became reunion zones where black family members found each other.

o   Kinlessness had amplified powerlessness and exploitability in slavery.

o   With the Civil War, the possibility of reuniting with the kin that slavery took away—not in the afterlife but in the here and now—was a revelation that mobilized enslaved people. 

o   For so many black families, it was antebellum America that was chaos. The Civil War opened the horizon of new order.