The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War by Tom Zoellner
published by The New Press (Sept. 2025)
I have been involved with refugees from various parts of Latin America and Africa for more than 45 years. I have taught them English, represented them as a lawyer in court, advocated for them at the Federal, state, and local level, and taught the next generation of lawyers how to advance the embattled struggle for refugee rights in the United States and internationally. I was encourage recently when Civil War and Reconstruction historians began a much more in depth examinations of refugee situations here in the United States during and after the Civil War. This reverses a long neglected part of our shared history and it helps us understand what modern refugees go through by comparing it to the historic precent from the 1860s.
In high school I took a very good American history tutorial with a retired college president from Virginia which spent two years teaching me about our history through the use of primary sources, textbooks from the Oxford University Press, and college-level term papers. I learned about the Freedmen’s Bureau without ever know that its real name was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Apparently Oxford University Press and many mainstream historians did not want to teach students about the internal crisis that saw hundreds of thousands of African Americans escaping from enslavement into the precarious asylum of Union Army camps.
That has changed in the 21st Century. There have been volumes about refugees fleeing their enslavement and coming into Union lines seeking protection and even freedom. For example, last year Bennett Parten used the story of Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864 to explore how enslaved African Americans found out about this massive military maneuver, learned that the Union troops would enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, and devised ways to break free of their enslavement in his book Somewhere Toward Freedom Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation. A year before, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life by Elizabeth D. Leonard used a biography of the famously controversial general to talk about Blacks “self-emancipation” after the lawyer-general created the concept of the “contraband camp.” Chandra Manning wrote Troubled Refuge about escaped Blacks organizing in contraband camps. And there are many other examples of how refugees and refugees camps have been incorporated into the modern story of the Civil War.
The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War by Tom Zoellner promises an in-depth look at the the refugee crisis and the struggle for freedom, but it only gets half-way there. The book starts off with a close examination of General Ben Butler’s refusal to return escaped slaves to their Confederate master when he commanded at Fortress Monroe at the eastern end of the Peninsula in Virginia. He originally gave sanctuary to three African Americans, but after a week there were 90 refugees living in tents in the fort. While the Federal government was still trying to figure out what to do with these ex-slaves, less than two months later there were more than nine hundred Black refugees availing themselves of Butler’s protection. The refugee camp was now called Slabtown and its inhabitants were put to work building fortifications, cooking for the soldiers, and handling shipments from up North.
Other Union commanders, hearing of Butler’s successful legal reasoning, began to open up similar refugee camps. Over the next four years, Zoellner estimates, eight hundred thousand men, women, and children found shelter in these make-shift encampments, a fifth of all the slaves in the South. And this was a zero-sum game. As the Union gained another laborer for its army, the South lost the economic contribution of the runaway. A fifth of the vital slave labor force of the Confederacy went over to the Union.
As camps spread out throughout the occupied South and Border States, camps were ubiquitous. Even in Washington, refugee enclosures were common on the outskirts of the city. In the summers, when Lincoln would ride to the Presidential Cottage northwest of the White House, he had to ride through a contraband camp. He sometimes stopped to talk to the newly freed Blacks, even singing a hymn with them on one occasion. And he was not the only leader of the North who did this. Most Union soldiers and politicians had never even talked to enslaved people. Now, whether you were a general or a private, you could find out about the reality of slavery from the slaves themselves without the chicanery of newspaper writers who, before the war, made slavery a positive good for Blacks. Similarly, Northern Abolitionists and clergymen could confirm their already negative views of slavery by helping set up refugee relief and living with the newly emancipated. Lincoln told Congresspeople that because “slaves would come to the camps and continual irritation was kept up” to end slavery.
The war was started by Confederates, but the circumstances they put in motion; fighting, armies moving throughout the South, escapes to Union lines as Federal troops moved through, and the establishment of refugee camps by soldiers and freedpeople, were according to Lincoln, pointing the way towards freedom. Zoellner says that on slavery, Lincoln did not “lead the process of emancipation.” He followed the lead of the escaped slaves and the receiving military actors. If only three escaped slaves had been accepted as contrabands during the war, he might have been reluctant to end slavery. However, after Ben Butler’s brilliant legal strategy and the flood of slaves coming into Union lines, Lincoln told his associates that these actions made emancipation all but inevitable.
Zoellner does a good job of telling how word of Butler’s initiative spread among Black population, and the dangerous routes to freedom. He retells the stories of individual African Americans deciding it was worth the risk to escape, the psychological impact of the route towards freedom, and the impact of entering the camp where long-separated family members were finally brought together for the first time in years. Zoellner also presents research on the life in the camps. Some were well run and clean, but others were just whole families sleeping in army tents. Many of the newly arrived were in the biggest community they had ever been in, and contagious diseases were likely to break out.
While this book is a good introduction to the refugees’ flight, it is also hindered in its message by frequent paragraphs about non-slave matters. These passages simply seem to pop-up in the text. They don’t give us any details about the refugees and they are unnecessary to the book. A better editor should have taken these out. They are distracting.
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