Troubled Refuge Quotes

“the idea that the U.S. government would treat with an enslaved person directly as a person and not indirectly as the possession of a white property owner simply made no sense. Yet here were hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of exactly such people, right in the lap of the Union army, the most obvious embodiment of the U.S. government outside the White House”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“Wherever slave owners tried to evacuate themselves and their slaves, the goal was to keep the workers who carried the most capital value and the Yankees away from each other.”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“By war’s end, well over 400,000—somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of the entire U.S. slave population according to the 1860 census—had taken refuge behind Union lines, most of them in contraband camps.”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“Butler used slaveholders’ own insistence that slaves were legal property to release slaves from owners’ grasps and illustrated how war could create possibilities unavailable in peacetime. The phenomenon of the Civil War contraband camp was born.”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“Yet for all the shortcomings to the alliance with Union military power, freedpeople enjoyed more success in obtaining their objectives under military authority than they did under civil authority.”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“Some of those encounters appear in the multivolume War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (commonly known as the Official Records), and many others appear in the Freedom series of document collections edited by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project.”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“A white husband and father who hired laborers to help him work his farm during the day, attended Odd Fellows meetings on Tuesday evenings, and worshipped at the Baptist church on Sunday enjoyed a wider range of individual rights and privileges than his wife, children, or hired hands did because his standing as husband, father, employer, Odd Fellow, and church member permitted him to do so,”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“citizen was someone seen by others in the community as independent, self-reliant, and capable of contributing to “the harmony, well-being, and prosperity of the community” either because of property ownership, the capability to grow or build or make things, or the ability to direct others to do so.”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“What did former slaves become once emancipated?12 That second question is easy to miss if we assume that the only two conditions a person could occupy were either enslavement or full inclusion within the American polity complete with enjoyment of equal rights, or, in other words, citizenship as we currently conceptualize it.”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War

“historians have long debated which people, decisions, and actions really destroyed slavery.”
― Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War