Expect Freedom Upon Arrival

On September 1, 1864, Sam Richards, a white merchant, saw the city of Atlanta explode. Around noon, rumors began circulating of a Confederate defeat on the outskirts of town. Confederate general John Bell Hood would be evacuating his forces at once, leaving William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army free to take the city. The next day, local officials surrendered the city to Sherman’s army without a fight. The campaign was complete. 

Atlanta was free, and neither Sherman’s soldiers nor the city’s formerly enslaved people wasted any time in demonstrating what that meant. Richards, for one, couldn’t believe the “impudent airs” Atlanta’s freed people put on in the face of their former masters. They “were all free and the Yankee soldiers don’t fail to assure them of that fact,” he wrote, noting that one freedwoman was “as independent as can be” and that two of the men he had enslaved had both escaped into the city. It was like that all over town. Atlanta, which weeks earlier had had thousands of enslaved people working on its defenses, was now a haven for freed people from across the region, with men and women pouring in from the surrounding countryside. As the dumbstruck Richards wrote, it was as if slavery had suddenly “vanished into air.”

Despite Richards’ apparent disbelief, slavery’s demise hadn’t been quite as sudden as he thought. If anything, it had been a slow process that had begun once Union armies had begun invading the South in the earliest days of the war; yet that, too, understates the complexity of what the process actually looked like on the ground, particularly in places still experiencing the vortex of war. James M. Wells, a U.S. cavalryman with a taste for adventure, had caught a glimpse of how complex the process could be some two months before Atlanta’s fall while retreating back to the city following a failed cavalry raid on targets in middle Georgia. He and his men were facing a tall task. Georgia’s scorching summer heat was in full blaze. The men were separated from the main body of mounted horsemen, and their only instructions had been to escape back to Atlanta by whatever means necessary. Though they had covered some of the terrain before, the good news ended there. Not only were the roads humming with Confederate cavalry, their horses were tired, they would soon need food, and the army’s lines around Atlanta remained many miles away.

Much to the benefit of Wells and his band, a group of enslaved women soon discovered the desperate cavalrymen and began acting as their guides. The women had no horses of their own, so the men rode while the women walked. The women guided them down creek beds and along footpaths so deep and dark that Wells likened riding along them to descending the depths of “some vast subterranean cavern.” Oftentimes the glare of torches led the way, shining upon fords or foot trails that made the dense Georgia brush more easily passable, which must have added to the feeling Wells had while riding in the dark of the night.

He couldn’t help but appreciate the steely courage of the women, who navigated the “impenetrable darkness” and faced grave repercussions if caught by Confederates. Pretty soon, larger groups of enslaved people began following along, increasing the size of the band. The enslaved people were all “determined to flee the country with us,” Wells remembered, though he left no indication that anyone ever did.

He didn’t get the chance to find out. Not long after meeting the enslaved women, Wells broke from the group during a surprise shootout with Confederate cavalry and was later captured, making him one of the many prisoners of war who never made it back to Atlanta following an operation sometimes remembered as Sherman’s “big raid.” The original plan of attack was for two cavalry forces to swing around Atlanta in opposite directions. General Edward M. McCook’s force of Union horsemen was to ride west while General George Stoneman’s squad of cavalrymen was to ride east. The two were then supposed to join forces south of Atlanta at Lovejoy Station in an attempt to cripple Hood’s last remaining supply line into the city. If successful, the two cavalry forces would ride on to Macon, liberate the Union soldiers held there, and then head for Andersonville Prison, the great gulag of the Confederacy, which held as many as 33,000 Union prisoners and sat in the state’s southwestern corner near the town of Americus.

The problem was that the operation had been a fiasco from the start. Stoneman ignored orders. Rather than linking up with McCook at Lovejoy Station, he bolted straight for Macon. That left Confederate cavalry free to consolidate around McCook’s forces, leading to a standoff southwest of Atlanta near Newnan. McCook, caught off guard andnexposed, had no choice but to retreat in a wild ride back to Atlanta that saw hundreds of Union cavalrymen either killed or captured. Stoneman, meanwhile, ran into trouble of his own just outside Macon. He encountered a large force of Confederate cavalry at Sunshine Church, and like McCook, he soon realized he was in trouble and ordered his men to make their own wild, lifesaving ride back to Atlanta, which was the situation Wells found himself in before being captured. But unlike McCook, who managed to escape capture, Stoneman did not. He and more than four hundred of his men, many of whom had been holding the line so others could escape, were taken captive, which put a final end to one of the most calamitous cavalry movements in the history of the war.

Nevertheless, despite being a stunning failure, the “big raid” was one of the first instances in which Sherman’s mounted wings dug deep into the Georgia countryside, carrying the war to communities well beyond Atlanta. For the unsuspecting, it was a wake-up call. A war that had once been distant and abstract was now up close and personal and looming all around. Militias took to arms, and whole communities stood guard. That meant “sleepless nights,” wrote Dolly Sumner Lunt, a widowed plantation mistress from Covington, southeast of Atlanta. Stoneman’s cavalry had been seen on the road, and Lunt had heard reports of stores being ransacked, railroads being destroyed, and neighbors taking flight.

In Newnan, where McCook’s raid came to an end, Fannie A. Beers, a nurse in a Confederate hospital, watched as Union cavalrymen clashed with Confederate horsemen. Locals rushed past her into the action while others fled. “There was no time for deliberation,” she wrote. The war was fast extending its reach.

For enslaved people, the raids carried a different meaning entirely. Some were rightly wary. Armed white men on horseback were specters that enslaved people knew to approach with caution. Yet the raids were also the army’s first foray into the upper sections of middle Georgia, a part of the state where the lower Piedmont begins folding into the state’s fertile plantation belt, home to thousands of enslaved people.

Blue-coated men penetrating that far into Georgia stirred already restless waters. Enslaved people began fleeing to the two cavalry divisions almost immediately. Several enslaved men guided McCook during his journey before being forced back at Newnan, and one historian has estimated that by the time Stoneman’s cavalry approached Macon, as many as five thousand enslaved people were following along. Tragically, many of those men—and possibly women and children, too—met a brutal fate once the raid went bad. One soldier urged them to “escape while they could, as their fate would be severe if captured” but admitted that “Some followed this advice” while “many others chose to remain” with the soldiers “at the risk of any fate.”

The men and women who fled to Sherman’s cavalry units or escorted escaped horseman back to federal lines represent part of a much larger whole. In all, historians estimate that at least half a million enslaved people fled to U.S. Army lines during the Civil War. Any number of others may have run to the army but never made it; many more may have fled to the army but were turned away. In any case, the point is that amid all the fighting and dying, one of the mainstays of the war was that enslaved people consistently and inexorably ran to the U.S. Army. Like death, it was one of the war’s few certainties: wherever the army moved, enslaved people followed its movements until they caught up and joined the ranks. It happened first in 1861, when three enslaved men in Virginia rowed over to Fort Monroe in Chesapeake Bay and asked for refuge, but it happened in every theater from the beginning of the war up until the very end.

The army had no choice but to respond. Benjamin Butler, the dour-faced New Englander who commanded Fort Monroe when the three men arrived, set the army’s first policy by declaring the men “contraband of war.” As he saw it, the men had been forced to work on Confederate defenses, or so they claimed, so to return them would be equivalent to helping the Confederacy. Had the three men not claimed that they had been forced to work on Confederate defenses, it is unclear how Butler would have acted. Nonetheless, when a Virginia slave owner insisted that the three men be returned, Butler refused, arguing that as a form of Confederate property, the enslaved men could be legally confiscated by the U.S. Army according to the laws of war. That was not exactly an emancipation decree. Butler’s reasoning said nothing about freedom. But that was never the point. The importance of the contraband policy was that it established a legal framework that allowed the U.S. Army to “confiscate” enslaved people who arrived at army lines with similar stories. The path to wartime emancipation began with that basic premise.

Congress codified the policy a month later in August 1861 when it passed an Act to Confiscate Property Used for Insurrectionary Purposes, otherwise known as the First Confiscation Act. As its name implies, the bill allowed for the seizure of Confederate property used in the Confederate war effort, and it included wording that applied directly to persons “held to labor or service,” which everyone knew meant enslaved people.

Yet from the moment Lincoln’s signature dried, the bill’s complications became apparent: Who, for instance, would determine if an enslaved person had been forced to aid the Confederate Army? According to the U.S. government, that was a decision for the court system, not necessarily the army, to make, which raised questions about how and when a court would make that decision and what the army should do in the meantime. Moreover, because the bill mirrored the contraband policy, it said nothing about freedom, which locked enslaved people into an in-between status as neither free nor enslaved. What did that mean for the freed people who arrived at army lines? What did it mean for the army? All those lingering questions made the First Confiscation Act difficult to enforce and easy to ignore.

Meanwhile, enslaved people continued escaping to the army. By the spring of 1862, large camps of freedom seekers began forming around Washington, DC, and Fort Monroe; other camps formed along the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas on islands occupied by the U.S. Army. Those camps have traditionally been known as “contraband camps,” but historians have recently renamed them “slave refugee camps” because that’s what they were: makeshift encampments and tent cities attached to the army and housing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of refugees from slavery, many of whom arrived with nothing while others carried all they had in a cart or wagon. Some refugees would eventually find work with the army. Men worked as teamsters or laborers; women often served as cooks or laundresses for a particular regiment. But not everyone found work. Others, especially women, children, and the elderly, lived as bona fide refugees, eking out an existence in the shadow of the army however they could.

Out in the west, where the army moved deeper and deeper into the Mississippi Valley as 1862 wore on, the situation was the same except that the camps there tended to be larger and more numerous. Large numbers of enslaved people fled to Nashville after it fell in February 1862. The same was true for New Orleans when it fell in May, and even larger numbers of enslaved people began arriving in the area around Memphis once the army occupied the city later in June. By then, a pattern had clearly emerged: all along the army’s path and especially in places where it had established firm control over a given area, enslaved people arrived in search of refuge. The experience was enough for some within the army to throw up their hands and ask for help from the government in deciding what to do. Ambrose Burnside, a U.S. general known more for his characteristic facial hair than his generalship, captured the exasperation some felt when he wrote from New Bern, North Carolina, describing an attempt to deter the refugees as “utterly impossible.”

The collective movement of so many enslaved people into army lines during the first year of the war eventually forced Congress into a policy change. In July 1862, just over a year after the first refugees had arrived at Fort Monroe, Congress passed a second, far more comprehensive Confiscation Act that read like a virtual emancipation decree. It dispensed with the messy distinction that only enslaved people who had been forced to work for the Confederacy could attain refuge and instead declared that any enslaved person with a rebellious master who escaped to federal lines would now be “forever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves.” The new wording made achieving refuge more accessible. But it was the last bit that mattered most of all. The bill specifically mentioned freedom, which moved away from the language of confiscation and announced Congress’ official endorsement of wartime emancipation. Enslaved people within occupied parts of the South could now escape to the army and expect freedom upon arrival.

Few people knew, however, that as Congress debated the merits of emancipation on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks away in the White House, President Abraham Lincoln was planning an emancipation order of his own. 

Excerpted from Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten. Copyright 2025 © by Bennett Parten. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC

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