Are basque about powerhouses used to Winning National championships. Being from indiana i have a faint memory of that day we were once relevant. At uvanote that you won because of a guy from indianapolis. Published, her book is right here, the book is titled embattled freedom journeys through civil war slave refugee camps. It is published by the university of North Carolina prep and part of the civil war america series. You had a pretty good year i would say. Dont you think so . Its going to take a while for me to tell you all the awards this important book has received. Its received the 2019 Tom Watson Brown prize for the society of civil war historians. From the organization of american historians. The book prize as well, you have cleaned up. Congratulations and it is absolutely welldeserved. As you well will discover. This is a very important book. I should add amy is not only a terrific scholar, also an excellent teacher as i recall. She received a Teaching Award from the university of kentucky. It is my pleasure to introduce amy murrell taylor. [applause] amy that was kind. I was walking over here this morning and thinking back to my junior year in college when i first got thinking about the civil war and studying the civil war and back then i never would have imagined i would be invited to speak at a place like gettysburg. Its a thrill to be here so thank you for inviting me. End, ato begin at the the end of the war in 1865 but really to be specific the fall of 1865 at a time when the union army was withdrawing from the south, mustering out men, leaving southern communities. I wanted to take you to a place where in all the traveling youve done for civil war sites and i imagine there has been a lot of travel. All the reading of your civil war a place you havent seen or heard about before. It was known at the time as sinclair farms. A 600 acre tract of land on virginias peninsula that stretched along the coast between hampton and newport news. Or if you want to put it in terms of civil war military six to about north eight miles northwest of fort monroe. The farm was named after a white man who owned the land in 1861. He was a confederate sympathizer put too old to serve in the Confederate Army so he supported the army in other ways. Initially he sold product from his farm to the army. Bacon and beef. He had a livestock farm. He fled the region like so many other white landowners did as the union moved in. His farm fell into union hands and over the course of the war it underwent a transformation that was nothing like anything Jefferson Sinclair probably ever envisioned for his property. In fact we could probably say it was one of his worst nightmares. Because by the hundreds and even thousands, his farm became the destination of people escaping slavery during the war. They came from surrounding farms and plantations in virginia. And a total of 4500 people had moved onto the property by the 1865. They changed it. It looks different as a result. They built houses, many hundreds of them. Scattered them in the roamed. They built five churches, at least one store, and they built a hospital, too. Our settlement on sinclair farm was told out in order and regularity one of the residents reported in 1865 and contained many buildings of comfort and convenience, even elegance. They planted crops. Once they predicted would yield better, richer, and heavier crops, twice fold what was known under the system of slavery. From its beginning as a plantation, once reliant on slave labor Jefferson Sinclair had enslaved 69 people in 1860, the farm became a refuge for people building the lives for themselves. So sinclair farm during the war began as a refugee camp that evolved into a new village, or even a new small town devoted to freedom. But only during the war. It did not last. In the fall of 1860 five, the 1865 the residents, all 4500 of them, were ordered off the land. Union officials, some army officers, agents of the newly established freedmens bureau, showed up on the property and forced them to find another place to settle. The same thing happened in hundreds of other places throughout the south in 1865 in 1866. Force was often involved. In some places, threats of violence was necessary to empty settlements of free people who did not want to leave. What happened here . What was going on . What did it all mean . Today i want to address these , questions while sharing the larger story of how a place like sinclairs farm came to be. A story of how slavery collapsed in a massive displacement of people. It was arguably a refugee crisis, one that bears some resume as to the refugee crises of today. This is a story that is not that well known in civil war history. Its not known for many reasons, some of which i will talk about. But theres a more dominant story of emancipation that has loomed large in our teaching and writing for generation s. You know the story, this is the story in which lincoln, the great emancipator issuess proclamation and grants freedom to enslaved people in one decisive turning point. Say, i am not here to role in lincolns emancipation history. What he did was important and remains an important part of that story. That not the only part of story. It is not the full story of how emancipation came about. If we turn our attention from house to these houses, places like helena, arkansas. Port royal, South Carolina. Places like the sinclair farm, we can begin to glimpse of the freedom promised by lincoln now insomething tangible the lives of formerly enslaved people. Having made it real pipe building these new settlements. We can begin to see how emancipation was lived and experienced. How it was won, and sometimes, how it was lost. But first a little background. This whole story begins at the beginning, in the wars opening days because that is when the first enslaved people determined this war had something to do with them and something to do with freedom and they set out to flee bondage and seek detection protection from the union army. That itself is pretty remarkable. I am going to try one more time oh, good, its working now except i went the wrong direction. There we go. This is a pretty remarkable thing. Just a month before the war started, in his inaugural address, president lincoln had promised he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed, in the south. He would not encourage the flight of enslaved people. In fact federal law constrained , him. Not just the constitution, but the fugitive slave act, which required the federal government to assist in returning enslaved people who ran away to their owners. Lincoln was not going to interfere. After several attempts in places like florida, maryland, virginia, in 1861, a group of enslaved people in virginia approached Union GeneralBenjamin Butler and persuaded him to see the benefits of allowing them inside union lines. We will labor for the union, they said. Think about that. It takes a very important labor away from the confederacy at the same time. Butler, who was no abolitionist that is an important fact to establish saw the important practical benefit of allowing these people inside the lines. He issued an order abandoning the fugitive slave act and required his men to protect these individuals as as contraband of war. As the confederacy was viewing these people as their property, then the union would seize them as contraband of war. Its not quite freedom. Butler is still viewing these people as property, but it was a pretty big step. By protection, what butler agreed to do was protecting them from returning to slavery, as well as providing them with food, shelter, and opportunities to work. It was a step that opened the floodgates. The story moves from the coast of virginia and the carolinas, across the border states. And down the Mississippi River valley. What i put on the screen here is a map of where new settlements of these people fleeing slavery emerged. You can kind of see this as a general map of where people were running away. One thing you might notice im sure many of you in this room are familiar with the general map of Union Occupation of the south, well you see the footprint of the emergence of these cams matches the footprint of occupation. The single most important variable determining where people could flee and when was proximity to the union army and its sphere of protection. The army had to come near or they had to go a Long Distance to find it. Once they started running away, these refugees from slavery became a pretty visible presence on the landscape. Clusters of housings emerged in these places, often as a collection of castoff tents, or a collection of burnedout buildings in a city like here in nashville over time, they gave way to more temporary , these more temporary forms of housing to newlybuilt huts, shacks, cabins, as they were variously described in the records. Sometimes they looked very similar to soldiers housing. Sometimes they were located very close to where the soldiers were living. The only thing that might separate them was a short distance, a creek, or in some cases a hill. If that was the case, you better bet the refugee housing was at the bottom of the hill in the least desirable, flood prone areas. And we should say mud prone as well because that could be a real problem for many of these people. Around these houses, they offered their labor to the union army as cooks, laundresses, hard laborers digging trenches or burial pits, as teamsters, laborers, assistants for the engineers and ordinance departments. Hospital stewards, nurses. In fort monroe, members of something called a standin police gang. It turns out they were people who were policing the beaches, but also digging and digging pits and burying horses and mules in those pits. They worked in all these different ways i should also mention spies and scouts. They are people who know the landscape quite well. They could be very useful to the army that way. As they worked, they were promised wages for their work for the first time. You may have heard me emphasize the word promised when i just said that. That would become a notoriously difficult problem. Some Union Officials refuse to actually pay, and this would become an ongoing problem and if you happen to be part of the conversation i am having tomorrow, this is something we will pick up as part of that discussion. They worked, but they suffered, too. They were not immune to the disease that swept army encampments. There was some medical care was provided to them by the army but it was often inadequate. In the Mississippi River valley in the last year of the war, their settlements became targets of regular violence. The settlements became embodiments of the social revolution these individuals wanted to create, but the confederates were trying to resist, so they became targets of irregular confederate violence. As one Union Official observed, there is scarcely one in them all escaped guerilla that atrocities. Despite of all of this, in became distant from combat such as the coast of virginia, and the carolinas these camps have the space and , the protection to evolve into something more permanent like was seen on sinclairs farm. To give you another example freedmans village. This diagram gets reproduced quite a bit. Maybe you have seen it before. This diagram gets reproducedfrer property that. Emerged on the property of robert e. Lee in arlington. This diagram is dated 1865. The very fact it existed and the way it looked you can see there was a bit of planning that went into creating this camp and you can see the houses lining the streets, parks, all sorts of buildings for schools and churches. You have a pond in the middle. Here is a photograph as well. Villages became the destination of missionaries and benevolent workers and relief workers from the north who helped establish these churches and schools and sent Copious Amounts of supplies pencils, maps and so forth into the south to help these freedom seeking people learn to read and write. Most important, a couple groups, quakers from philadelphia and richmond, indiana moving south. Also, the American Missionary Association which was a nonsectarian organization coming out of new york which sent large numbers of missionaries into the south. Altogether, this was, as some historians have suggested, the greatest slave rebellion in American History. At the very least it was a a of an estimated 500,000 men, women, and children. Thats 18 of the enslaved one eight of the enslaved population in 1860 hit the road to seek freedom. A migration that built steadily over the entire four years of the war. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this migration is that enslaved people continued to flee into union lines, especially those first two years of the war, even without assurance they would achieve legal freedom. They would remain, in the eyes of the union, contraband. Property. Or, as more and more people put it, refugees. You may notice i am using the term refugee, not contraband. This was quite debated at the time, but particularly in abolitionist circles who rejected the term contraband as a term not fit for human being. They were called refugees because they had a compelling need for protection and were fleeing persecution, much like refugees today and they were living in this suspended state of uncertainty about their status and their belonging in the United States. All sorts of questions surrounded them. It would the union recognize their legal freedom . Or would be union when the war would the union when the war . So much was uncertain, largely because of a basic and centrally important fact about emancipation. It was not something that could be decreed simply by politicians, but had to be one by an army at war and that army would prove to be an imperfect ally, as you probably already heard me suggesting. The union army was not equipped to oversee a refugee crisis when the war began and most men did not predict this would be part of their duty. Soldiers and officers varied in their commitment to ending slavery, something historians here this week and have written about. Some soldiers and officers were abolitionists and they dove right in. Some of them became very active in assisting these refugees. Some of them assumed positions, newly created official positions in the military bureaucracy as superintendents of contraband or superintendents of colored refugees. There were others who felt the opposite and did the opposite. In the most extreme cases, there were Union Soldiers who helped confederate slaveowners retrieve their slaves from the camps. And it times, the considerations of what they needed to win the war did not align with the interests of these refugees from slavery. Lincoln would go on to justify it legally as a military necessity. To quote the actual language. An act of justice warranted by the constitution as a military necessity. With this there was an alignment. But this was maybe true in theory and easier to imagine in the abstract than in every day life inside these caps. Inside these camps. Sometimes these two sets of needs and interests were not aligned at all and collided in the everyday ways, like when the union army needed to move, but it was in the best interest of refugees to stay put, or when the army needed resources or space that had been allotted to the refugees. When collisions happened, of course, the needs of the military won out and came first, which meant a pretty tumultuous existence for those seeking freedom inside union army lines. To give you a better sense of how this military life was experienced by particular refugees of slavery, i want to tell you about one case involving a married couple, edward and Emma Whitehurst, who are among the first to head into union lines. They were born into slavery in virginia. They spent most of their lives in newport news, on a plantation there, on the virginia peninsula. I will highlight the peninsula here. Dont see my pointer exactly, but you can probably see newport news. That is roughly where their plantation was. Emma was a field hand. Edward was what we call a hired out slave. What that meant was he probably had a particular skill although that skill has escaped detection in the record and his owner was hiring him out to other white men in the region who needed that skill for particular time. And then whitehurst would bring the wages back to his owner that were earned. What happened was a man might work what we would call over time work even later into the evening and in some cases, that enslaved man was allowed to keep that, what they called overwork day. Edward was. He kept his overwork a and pay and started saving it. He and his wife started saving it. What were they saving for . Hard to know, but it was pretty common for enslaved people to save to purchase their own freedom, so that was very likely what they had in mind. They saved and they saved, and by 1861, they had 500 in gold and silver coin, which they kept in a trunk. But that was 1861 and the war came and the war changed everything, as wars often do. Within weeks of the war beginning, they began to hear from other enslaved people around them on their plantation, on surrounding plantations, they began hearing about what was happening at fort monroe, and they heard about Benjamin Butlers order allowing them to come into union lines as contraband of war. They probably heard this because the plantation from which the very first people entered fort monroe was a plantation that was basically adjacent to their own. So they probably knew those individuals. Well, not long after butlers order, the union army moved from fort monroe into newport news and established a new camp there called camp butler after Benjamin Butler. Camp butler was two miles from the plantation where the whitehursts were living, and in may 1861, they seized the moment. They left. They went to camp butler and obtained work in the camp hospital. Edward got himself employed as a guide for the army, as it made its way toward big bethel in what turned out to be a failed campaign that summer. It turned out to be a pretty tumultuous existence that summer. They did not just enter a camp and everything went smoothly on the course toward freedom. No, it was pretty, as i said, tumultuous. What was going on . There were attempts by confederates to recapture the people who had gone into union lines. After first manassas that summer, the union,