Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

A fascinating and original portrait of the escaped-slave refugee camps and how they shaped the course of emancipation and black citizenship.

By the end of the Civil War, nearly half a million slaves had taken refuge behind Union lines in what became known as “contraband camps.” These were crowded, dangerous places, yet some 12-15 percent of the Confederacy's slave population took almost unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the first places Northerners came to know former slaves ...