US slavery,civil war,and the emancipation of enslaved mothers

ABSTRACT

In the United States, slavery’s destruction was a war-long process, shaped not only by Union military victories, legislation, and presidential proclamations, but also by contradictory, inconsistent and sometimes lethal policies enacted by the Union military and federal government toward refugees from slavery. The haphazard nature of those policies and their often deadly consequences were never more evident than in the experience of enslaved women, mothers, and the children under their care, who approached Union lines in pursuit of freedom, but encountered a gauntlet of conflicting and unevenly enforced military edicts and a humanitarian crisis still only superficially understood by many Civil War historians.