Refugees

The American Civil War, during which large sections of the nation became literal battlegrounds for the armies of the North and South, resulted in a massive displacement of citizenry that remains a singular event in U.S. history. The states whose populations endured the greatest upheaval were those in the secessionist South, followed by border states whose citizens were divided in their sympathies, such as Missouri and Tennessee. The refugees largely fell into three groups: white Southerners who fled their homes as Union troops advanced; white Southern refugees driven from their homes by secessionists; and slaves. Of the third category, some were captured as contraband by victorious Union troops, while other blacks in bondage seized the opportunity presented by the chaos of war and their suddenly absentee owners, and escaped to the North and freedom—where many then joined the Union Army and the fight to vanquish the Confederacy. There were also a number of Native Americans uprooted by the war, some of whom chose to fight for the Union or Confederate cause.

White Southerners

Few reliable figures exist that provide a concrete total for the number of Americans displaced by war between 1861 and 1865. Some of the wealthiest Southern families were able to book passage on vessels bound for Europe, Honduras, and Brazil, but many other members of the Confederate elite remained at home, where the situation was perilous. The wife of Confederate Army general Robert E. Lee was part of the first wave of internal refugees in May 1861, when she fled her home in Arlington, Virginia, to which she was never able to return. Another woman, Virginia Clay-Clopton, despite being married to a prominent politician and being close to the family of Confederate States of America (CSA) president Jefferson Davis, was forced to spend most of the war years in transit. She stayed in hotels or with members of her extended family, and paid Confederate soldiers to serve as escorts for her and her sister on routes that were dangerous for unaccompanied women, or indeed for any noncombatant.

Born in North Carolina, Clay-Clopton settled in Huntsville, Alabama, after her 1843 marriage to Clement Claiborne Clay, and lived part of the year in Washington after her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate in the 1850s. She was in her mid-thirties when war broke out, and spent four years staying with various friends and family members in the South, often accompanied only by her sister; the two passed the time sewing and knitting garments for their husbands, because warm clothing was at a premium due to wartime shortages. Clay-Clopton initially headed to Richmond, the Confederate capital, like many residents of Southern states who had been forced to flee their homes at the war's onset. In 1860 Richmond's population was 40,000, but it swelled to 100,000 during the war (Gallagher 2001, p. 95). Overcrowded conditions bred disease, and epidemics of smallpox and scarlet fever periodically swept though the city, forcing those who had the means, such as Clay-Clopton, to flee once again.

In her 1905 memoir, A Belle of the Fifties, Clay-Clopton recalled making her way to Georgia by train with her sister. The two "rode from Stevenson to Chattanooga on the freight train, the baggage-cars on the passenger-train being unable to receive a single trunk. Arriving at Chattanooga, we would have been forced to go to the small-pox hotel or remain in the streets but for the gallantry of an acquaintance of ours, an army officer of Washington memory, who gave up his room to us" (p. 192). Clay-Clopton later returned to Richmond, but conditions there were now abysmal:

Patients in the hospitals suffered, even for necessary medicines. Sugar was sold at fifty Confederate dollars a pound. Vegetables and small fruits were exceedingly scarce. My visits to the hospital wards were by no means so constant as those of many of my friends, yet I remember one poor little Arkansas boy in whom I became interested, and went frequently to see, wending my way to his cot through endless wards, where an army of sick men lay, minus an arm, or leg, or with bandaged heads that told of fearful encounters. The drip-drip of the water upon their wounds to prevent the development of a greater evil is one of the most horrible remembrances I carry of those days. (p. 201)

Pro-Union Refugees

Life during wartime presented even greater perils for Union sympathizers caught behind enemy lines. A young woman named Cora Mitchel was the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut cotton merchant who had, with other Northern entrepreneurs, helped to make the city of Apalachicola, Florida, the third busiest port on the Gulf of Mexico, after New Orleans and Mobile. The Apalachicola River had two tributaries, the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers, each of which went deep into Georgia almost to the border of South Carolina. In the years before the war, New England traders with ties to Europe made Apalachicola into an important way station for cotton shipments between the plantations and lucrative foreign markets.

At the outbreak of war, Mitchel and her brother first went to Columbus, Georgia, where her married sister was living, and attended school there. Her brother was soon conscripted by force into the Confederate Army—despite the fact that he was underage—and became ill from one of the fevers that regularly swept through Army camps on both sides due to poor sanitary conditions. When he returned home on leave, Mitchel's father fled north with him. The fact that her brother was a deserter became well known in Apalachicola, and Mitch-el's mother, Sophia, began to fear for her safety as well as that of her younger children. Sophia Mitchel then decided to travel to Columbus to retrieve Cora, in preparation for the family's final flight north.

The 300-mile trip up the Chattahoochee River the Mitchels planned to make was a perilous one, as part of the waterway had been blockaded by Confederate forces. On the journey back to Apalachicola, Mitchel and her mother had to pick up CSA passports, recently required for travel to Gulf Coast ports in order to prevent further Confederate army desertions. "Immediately on our arrival at Fort Gaines mother went to the arsenal for the passport," Mitchel wrote. "She was met by a very agreeable young adjutant, who said he had not the power to give us one, but he was expecting the major back at any moment and he would give it." Over the next two days, Sophia Mitchel repeated the four-mile round-trip walk, with no success. On the fourth day, Cora asked her mother if she might try instead; when she returned, she had the travel documents in hand. "My youth probably appealed to the young man, and he could not help feeling that I ought not to be detained," she wrote in her memoir. "We did not know it then, but found out afterwards that he had orders to detain us till the major came, as we were not to be allowed to go on" (1916, pp. 18–19).

Because of the blockade, part of Mitchel's journey had to be made through the bayou, which

had been widened and deepened by the force of the strong current, but as the stream carried off the banks the trees would fall in, making it much more dangerous, and the utmost care and skill were necessary to bring us through in safety. Mother and I lay in the bottom of the boat with strict orders not to move, while the little boat was tossed about by the swift current. If we had hit one of the projecting trees, we would have sunk immediately. (1916, pp. 20–21)

At night, after getting back on the river itself, they went ashore to rest. Mitchel remembered feeling "excited by the novelty and beauty of the scene":

The moon was full, and though just before Christmas, the weather was mild. The air was heavy with the scents of the forest behind us, from which could be heard, from time to time, the calls of owls, panthers and wildcats. We saw none, but there was always the expectation that one would appear. We roasted peanuts in the coals and toasted bacon and corn pones. These were our only food during the entire journey. The river water, muddy though it was, satisfied our thirst. Supplies of all kinds had long been very scarce, and we had learned to be very thankful for little, and that of the simplest. (1916, p. 22)

At Apalachicola, Mitchel and her mother gathered the remaining children and managed to get aboard a ship bound for Key West, at the tip of Florida—no easy feat. There, "another problem presented itself," Mitchel wrote. "The town was full of refugees. The one hotel was crowded to its fullest capacity, and no boat from New Orleans [was] in sight" because of a yellow fever outbreak in Key West (1916, p. 36). Finally, one appeared, and Mitchel's mother was able to convince the captain to let her family of six have the only available stateroom, which had no natural light and flooded every morning when the decks were washed. "We were only one group among many forlorn refugees. We were shabby and neglected. Part of the time we were seasick, and always [we were] uncomfortable in our cramped quarters," she wrote, but they arrived safely in New York and then headed to Rhode Island, where they reunited with her father and brother (1916, p. 41).

A Lutheran Pastor in Tennessee

Border states such as Kentucky and Tennessee, where loyalties were divided, also produced a torrent of refugees. It was in the towns and villages of these states that the divisiveness of the war was felt most immediately, as once-cordial neighbors turned bitter toward one another. Hermann Bokum, a German immigrant who had settled in the Cumberland Mountains region as a pastor, provided one account of the war in his 1863 book, The Testimony of a Refugee from East Tennessee. He described how local men eager to aid Confederate forces joined regiments that were beginning to form at the war's onset. Union loyalists in the area, however, set fire to some of the bridges that these regiments would need to pass over to reach Virginia; in reprisal, state officials sympathetic to the Confederate cause meted out harsh punishments to ordinary civilians. "A man named Haun had been taken to prison, because he had taken part in the burning of the bridges," Bokum recounted. "The names of the persons who tried him have never been made public….Others beside him were hung, still others were shot down or otherwise murdered" (p. 8).

Bokum had traveled to Washington to plead the case of Union sympathizers in Tennessee, but when he returned home he was troubled by rumors his friends reported back to him—that he, too, might be hanged without a trial. In June 1861 Tennessee became the last of the border states to secede from the Union, and a conscription law then went into effect. Bokum failed to report to the mustering site, after which he received word that a party of five were heading to his home to arrest him:

I had made up my mind to go to prison. I could not bear the thought of leaving the atmosphere where my wife and my children were breathing, but my wife prevailed on me to go to our friends in the North. Her last words were: "Fear not for me, I trust in God"; I begged her to kiss our children, and I turned into the mountains. Never I trust, shall I cease to be thankful for the gracious manner in which I was shielded from harm in that perilous journey. Six months later my wife and my children arrived in Cincinnati, having crossed the Cumberland Mountains in the rear of the two contending armies, and having made more than 300 miles in an open buggy." (1863, p. 10)

They eventually relocated to Philadelphia, where Bokum became chaplain at Turner's Lane Hospital.

An Ozark Ballad's Tale

There were also significant numbers of men who joined the Union Army after fleeing home states that had seceded. One of them was Daniel Martin, an Arkansas man whose story survives in a well-known Ozark Mountains folk song, "The Battle of Elkhorn Tavern," which cultural historians believe Martin likely wrote himself and passed on to his descendants. A farmer who was probably in his early twenties when the war broke out, Martin left the Confederate state to join the pro-Union Missouri Infantry volunteers at Rolla, Missouri. The ballad, which recounts Martin's two years of service, begins with the stanza, "My name is Daniel Martin, I was born in Arkansas / I fled from those bad rebels who fear not God nor law / I left my aged parents. I left my loving wife / I was forced to go to Rolla to try and save my life." The song goes on to recount the events of the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern, as well as those of the March 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge, which finally gave the Union side firm control of Missouri. The lyrics conclude with the observation, "And if ever I get through this war you may call me roasted done / I'll never go to fight again for money, love or fun."

The Plight of Slaves

Untold numbers of blacks were caught up in the Civil War, and while many were too fearful of reprisals to strike out on their own once chaos descended on the South, others fled north to freedom. Many sought shelter and protection at Union Army camps, and the federal government found itself struggling to care for thousands of displaced persons who had neither homes nor income to provide for their families. When Union forces captured the strategic North Carolina city of New Bern in March 1862, General Ambrose Burnside appointed a superintendent of the poor to oversee relief efforts. Fifteen months later, government officials sent to investigate conditions in the area filed a report stating that "7,500 colored persons and 1,800 white persons received relief" through the efforts of the superintendent, but that

the average proportion dealt out in each of the staple articles of food—as flour, beef, bacon, bread, &c.—was about as one for each colored person relieved to sixteen for each white person to whom such relief was granted. At the time this occurred work was offered to both blacks and whites; to the whites at the rate of $12 a month, and to the blacks at the rate of $8 a month. (Owen, McKaye, and Howe 1863, n.p.)

A horrific incident at Camp Nelson, a Union Army camp in Kentucky, captured the plight of former slaves in newly mustered black regiments after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863 and separate army units for black soldiers were created. The wives and children of these former slaves, having no place else to go, came with them to Camp Nelson and other sites, despite vehement local opposition. Camp Nelson's commanding officer, Brigadier General Speed S. Fry, referred to the problem as "the [Expletive] Woman Question," and feared that food rations would run out, diseases would kill soldiers before they even got to battle, and the presence of families nearby would lead to a quick breakdown of military discipline (Wilson 2002, p. 187). After several attempts to get rid of them, on November 23, 1864, Fry succeeded in expelling 400 women and children. They had nowhere to go, almost no possessions, and were driven out into cold weather. The African American soldier Joseph Miller recounted the details of that day: "[M]orning was bitter cold. It was freezing hard. I was certain it would kill my sick child to take him out in the cold. I told the man in charge that it would be the death of my boy. I told him my wife and children had no place to go and I told him that I was a soldier of the United States. He told me that it did not make any difference" (quoted in Wilson 2002, p. 187). Miller's family was ejected, and when he finally found them they were "shivering with cold and famished with hunger. They had not received a morsel of food during the whole day" (p. 187), and his child was indeed among the scores of casualties that resulted from Fry's decision.

The Camp Nelson incident was widely reported in the Northern papers and stirred outrage. To make amends for the atrocity, federal officials established formal refugee housing at the camp, called the Home for Colored Refugees. Nearly a hundred duplex cottages housed families, and there was also a school, mess hall, and hospital. The site was taken over after the war ended in 1865 by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, a federal agency usually referred to in shortened form as the Freedmen's Bureau. A sympathetic West Point graduate, civil rights supporter, and Union general named Oliver O. Howard (1830-1909) was installed as director of the Freedmen's Bureau. Howard's field agents, however, were notoriously corrupt in their duties, which included monitoring the newly defeated Southern areas for incidents of abuse that appeared to be continuations of bondage, and overseeing the creation of a free labor market.

Once freed from slavery, many of the South's blacks became refugees, and many were desperate for any kind of work, even if it entailed returning to plantations. The Preliminary Report of the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission included the account of one young Confederate sympathizer, Frederick A. Eustis, who had returned home to take over the family's South Carolina plantation. He was met by former slaves eager to work for wages:

I never knew during forty years of plantation life so little sickness. Formerly every man had a fever of some kind, and now the veriest old cripple, who did nothing under secesh [Confederate] rule, will row a boat three nights in succession to Edisto, or will pick up the corn about the corn-house. There are twenty people whom I know were considered worn out and too old to work under the slave system, who are now working cotton, as well as their two acres of provisions; and their crops look very well. (Owen, McKaye, and Howe 1863, n.p.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"The Battle of Elkhorn Tavern." Available from http://musicanet.org/.

Bokum, Hermann. The Testimony of a Refugee from East Tennessee. Philadelphia, 1863.

Clay-Clopton, Virginia. A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, Covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853-66. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905.

Gallagher, Gary W. The American Civil War: The War in the East 1861–May 1863. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2001.

Massey, Mary Elizabeth. Refugee Life in the Confederacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Reprint, 2001.

Mitchel, Cora. Reminiscences of the Civil War. Providence, RI: Snow & Farnham, 1916.

Owen, Robert Dale, James McKaye, and Samuel. G. Howe. Preliminary Report of the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission to the Secretary of War. New York: 1863.

Wilson, Keith P. Campfires of Freedom: The Camp Life of Black Soldiers during the Civil War. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002.

Carol Brennan