There was no one moment when freedom came to the enslaved in the United States. When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the clouds did not part, the sun did not shine beams of freedom, and the shackles of slavery locked for nearly 250 years did not magically fall away.
And it doesn’t diminish Lincoln to acknowledge that.
“It’s a pretty entrenched story in our national memory that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and on Jan. 1, 1863, enslaved people were free,” says historian Amy Murrell Taylor. “We need to puncture a big hole in this national mythology — without diminishing Lincoln.”
The truth is much more complicated. Millions of Americans gained freedom from 1861 to 1865 in a slow-moving wave that includes the Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth and the passage of the 13th Amendment. There are millions of stories to tell.
Many ran across Union lines and emancipated themselves, flooding into hastily constructed “contraband” camps. (Taylor calls them refugee camps.) Some brought family members and wagonloads of belongings, others were forced to choose between freedom and their children. For some, the Union line and its liberation came to them.
Some formerly enslaved people encountered sympathetic White soldiers and missionaries who helped them. Others were treated like vagrants or were handed over to be re-enslaved. Some gained freedom by enlisting in the Union Army and fighting the people who had enslaved them. Some states read the writing on the wall and abolished slavery by state action during the war; others dug in their heels and wouldn’t let go until the 13th Amendment forced them to months after the war was over.
“For many people, the process went on for years,” Taylor told The Washington Post. “I think we miss the actions of enslaved people, how pivotal they were in pushing emancipation forward, when we focus just on one moment.” Without them, she said, the Civil War might have ended without abolition.
In Taylor’s 2018 book, “Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps,” she used a “treasure trove” of military records to reconstruct this period from the perspectives of individual people who forged new lives in the refugee camps that dominated the landscape but were forgotten in historical reports.