Navigating Liberty: Black Refugees and Antislavery Reformers in the Civil War South by John Cimprich (review)

Reviewed by: Navigating Liberty: Black Refugees and Antislavery Reformers in the Civil War South by John Cimprich Monica Maria Tetzlaff (bio) Navigating Liberty: Black Refugees and Antislavery Reformers in the Civil War South. By John Cimprich. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. 248. Cloth, 45. 00. ) John Cimprich’s contribution to the historiography of emancipation specifically compares the viewpoints and experiences of African American refugees and antislavery reformers. Navigating Liberty lives up to the title of the series of which it is a part—Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. During the Civil War, thousands of Black refugees escaped from slavery and began to shape their own fates, negotiating their freedom with white reformers. Cimprich defines “reformer” as “a shorthand label for those, mostly northerners, who worked behind Federal lines to improve the lives of Black refugees” (8). Cimprich’s reformers include Union military officers, aid workers, missionary teachers, plantation superintendents, medical personnel, and Freedmen’s Bureau officials. The drama of the first stages of Black freedom between 1861 and 1865 was recorded in the journals and reports of reformers (white and Black), interviews on camp conditions, newspaper reports, and a few letters written or dictated by African Americans. Cimprich also culls quotations by freed-people from the reformers’ writings. Navigating Liberty is meant to be an overview, and there is much recent secondary source material, which Cimprich summarizes. Cimprich divides his book into two sections: “Initial Interactions, ” which covers the period before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863, and “Later Developments, ” which carries the reader from emancipation to the war’s end. The author chooses to call the African American freedom seekers “Black refugees, ” a term usually associated with fleeing one’s nation, but during a civil war it seems apt. In “Initial Interactions, ” he explains that the term “contraband of war” was applied to these African Americans by General Benjamin F. Butler at Fort Monroe, Virginia, in 1861 as a rationale that justified not returning Confederate “property” to slaveholders. The logic worked and the term “contrabands” was used by many northerners and sometimes by the refugees themselves, although abolitionists objected to the dehumanizing aspect of the word. In the years that followed, contraband camps existed in nearly all the areas of Union-occupied territory in the Confederate South and sometimes also in Unionist slaveholding states. Cimprich provides helpful maps showing the camps and uses graphs with statistics like enslaved population numbers, but the majority of his emphasis is on the narrative of his subjects. Cimprich divides the reformers into three groups, based on their preferred strategies—paternalists, laissez-faire advocates, and egalitarians. End Page 138 The paternalists were the most numerous, and Cimprich ventures an explanation why—”widespread destitution among Black refugees, the military’s need for order behind the lines, and the prevalence of racial stereotypes” (11). Because paternalists tended to be the most direct, they were likely to have conflict with African American refugees when the two groups differed as to working conditions, family organization, and religion. Laissez-faire reformers “believed in the promotion of self-help and free choices” (11), an attitude that was welcomed when Blacks wanted to find or create their own employment, but not when there were virtually no work opportunities in battleground areas and many were sick and dying. As Cimprich says in his conclusion, “Laissez-faire reformers’ restrictive approach to charity occasionally caused unnecessary suffering” (144). Egalitarians were the least affected by racial stereotypes and supported the desires of African Americans, whether for aid or self-help. Not surprisingly, reformers sometimes clashed with each other over how to run relief programs or contraband camps. Among the egalitarians, Cimprich often quotes women, drawing on biographies but adding his own archival research. For example, Paula Whitacre has written about Julia Wilbur, a white egalitarian reformer, 1 but Cimprich also finds her words in reports to the Rochester Ladies’ Antislavery Society. Wilbur was based at Alexandria, Virginia, and became friends with Black reformer Harriet Jacobs, who was also based there. Cimprich puts the two women’s perspectives together, making good use of Jean Fagan Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004). He notes that Wilbur and Jacobs. . .