Self-Emancipation and Progressive Politics: The Legacy of Civil War Refugee Camps

This paper examines the evolution of political outcomes in Civil War Refugee Camps, where 660,000 out of the 3.9 million enslaved African Americans achieved and experienced freedom for the first time. Refugee Camps were sites of African American empowerment, where racially-progressive politics enjoyed an electoral advantage in the short and long runs. This persistence masks a backlash that befell in the first decades of the 20th century, when white voters overturned the progressive legacy. How did progressive politics re-emerge? African Americans' successful educational engagement in refugee camps enabled durable lower illiteracy rates and higher social status, which fostered inter-group contact in educational spaces and the workplace by the second half of the 20th century. Ultimately, these interactions triggered a transmission of views and political preferences from African Americans to white Americans. All in all, this paper shows that the process through which slavery ended, and not only slavery itself, had a lasting impact on the US's political landscape. (Access paper here)