Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

From the author of What This Cruel War Was Over, a vivid portrait of the Union army's escaped-slave refugee camps and how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States.

Chandra Manning casts in a wholly original light what it was like to escape slavery, how emancipation happened, and how citizenship in the United States was transformed. This reshaping of hard structures of power would matter not only for slaves turned citizens, but for all Americans. Integrating a wealth of new findings, this vivid portrait of the Union army's escaped-slave refugee camps shows how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States.

Drawing on records of the Union and Confederate armies, the letters and diaries of soldiers, transcribed testimonies of former slaves, and more, Manning allows us to accompany the black men, women, and children who sought out the Union army in hopes of achieving autonomy for themselves and their communities. 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.

CHANDRA MANNING graduated summa cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, received the M.Phil. from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and took her Ph.D. at Harvard University. She has taught at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and served as Special Advisor to the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for two years. She is Professor of History at Georgetown University, and divides her time between there and Braintree, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and children.