Closer to Freedom

With emancipation, freedom did not have a specific location; enslaved people did not need to head north to no longer be enslaved. Rather than geographic location or stability, freedom was once again associated with the same determining factor of the rival geography: mobility. Formerly enslaved people were now legally free to move around spaces as they pleased, which historian Leon Litwack has coined the “feel of freedom” (118).

Emancipation and its subsequent freedom of mobility was, Camp argues, the result of enslaved people’s own movements during the war seeking Union-occupied territory in the South, where they became “contrabands.” Initially, there was a range of treatment that these fugitives received upon reaching Union lines, including being forced back to their enslavers. Due to the large numbers of enslaved people fleeing, however, and moral, legal, and military concerns regarding refusing them, Lincoln made the decision that the military would become integrated, leading to the Emancipation Proclamation, which liberated enslaved people in the Confederate states in January 1863. The Union army did not want to refuse the labor that Black people brought to them through their flight.

War enabled enslaved people to move in new ways and also solidified gender differences, even as both men and women fled for Union army camps. Many men left Union camps to retrieve their families and bring them into the camps. Women remained more conspicuous, however, since they were still lacking the permissible mobility of enslaved men, and flight for them remained riskier.

The gender demographics of plantation space shifted dramatically during the war. Able-bodied enslaved men had disproportionately been sold to the Deep South for agricultural work in the early and mid-1800s, and they had also increasingly enlisted in the army. Therefore, women who decided to flee often had to make a break without the assistance of more geographically literate men. For the first time in American slavery, however, women represented close to half of all fugitives from enslavement. The vast majority of enslaved people on plantations during the Civil War, however, were women.

Despite the thousands of fugitives who became contrabands and later, soldiers, the majority of enslaved people remained on the plantation rather than fleeing, and the labor of enslaved people remained crucial to plantation life throughout the war, especially the labor of enslaved women. White women also outnumbered white men on plantations, as the majority of eligible white men served in the military, often leaving plantations to be managed by white women. While also employing violence against enslaved people, women tended not to use it in the same systemic ways as men, and their violence tended to be “impulsive” rather than deliberate. Women did not maintain control as thoroughly as men had, and the movement of Black people during the war was as much a result of the presence of Union forces as the absence of Southern white men.

For enslavers, much of their identity and sense of self resided in their enslavement of other humans. Not only did slavery allow for a minority of Southern white men to accrue great wealth, but it also imbued in them a sense of “independence.” The enslavement of Africans in the 17th century had freed poor white people from indentured servitude, as European servitude gave way to African enslavement. Slavery enabled white men not only to enslave and dominate people but, consequently, feel that they were their own masters, believing themselves ironically beholden to no one. With the Civil War, this sense of “independence” was under assault.

Confederate pickets became a new element of control within the plantation geography. To the surprise of many Union soldiers, the pickets were oriented toward the containment of enslaved people within the plantation rather than the defense of the plantation from outside forces, focused internally rather than externally. Some Union officers were similarly focused on controlling contraband, with their own containment measures often resembling those of plantation geography.

The rival geography that had previously been almost exclusively Black, except for a few white traders, now opened up to Confederate deserters and Union soldiers, in particular, since they were foreign to the South both geographically and culturally. They depended on help from enslaved people in their navigation of the rival geography, which was becoming integrated. This Black acceptance of Union white people into the rival geography also helped to defeat the Confederacy.