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.