Manning, Chandra

OUR SYNOPSIS: Chandra Manning explores how Black people fled to the Union army to escape slavery during the Civil War, raising the question of what can be learned from studying these experiences. She first focuses specifically on Union contraband camps that housed enslaved people fleeing slavery, to piece together how “The experience of emancipation began in the intimate details of the everyday.” (28) Most of these fugitive people were women and children. Then she steps back to analyze the more macro-level developments, particularly processes of military emancipation and the pursuit of citizenship. What people fleeing slavery were able to leverage was their great usefulness to the Union in the war effort. In return, they received “not the unearnable gift of freedom, but rather a new, direct relationship with the U.S. government.” (215) Throughout the book, she emphasizes the persistent threat of possible re-enslavement to show the precarity of emancipation. Widespread assumptions about slavery and its relationship to both federal power and Blackness threatened to re-enslave people. This is a big part of why refuge in contraband camps was so troubled, hence the book’s title.