When Clara Dargan heard that Confederate general Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Union general Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865, her first thought was “I must go home.” Like most white refugees, Dargan, a sixteen-year-old from Columbia, South Carolina, living in Chatham County, North Carolina, longed to return home as soon as the war ended. Shortly after Christmas 1864, Dargan had been sent to “the interior of North Carolina, . . . when it was considered unsafe to remain in the possible line of march of Sherman’s merciless myrmidons.” Without mail for weeks, Dargan had no news from home or from family members, which the war had scattered. Despite her fervent desire to return home, Dargan found that “transportation was impossible. Railroads were destroyed; horses and mules of any worth had been seized by friends or foes; vehicles of all sorts were apprehended or in a state of utter dilapidation.” With her refugee home more than forty miles from the nearest railroad stations in Raleigh and Greensboro, Dargan had to stay in Chatham County for several months after the Confederate surrender, until she could take a “spavined mule and dilapidated buggy” to Greensboro. There she boarded a train home, horrified that the other passengers were “a motley crowd, consisting chiefly of ‘citizens of African descent’ and Yankee soldiers.” Except for a confrontation with Union soldiers in Salisbury, her trip south from Greensboro through Charlotte was uneventful. Once she entered South Carolina, however, she saw the “‘desolation of desolation.’ Not a fence or house or living animal where once I had remembered such happy homesteads.” When she finally arrived at home, she found “a chimney here, a blackened ruin there, the silence as of death, attested the pathway of the destroyer. One wondered where all the former dwellers in these homes had gone. Where were their cows and chickens, and hogs, and cattle?”1
Confederate surrenders at Appomattox, Bennett Place, and elsewhere did not bring an end to the North Carolina refugee crisis. Reconstruction changed the terms but did not fundamentally alter the debates over land, resources, and mobility that the refugee crisis had created. As in earlier phases of the crisis, a refugee’s geographical and social position shaped the options available to him or her. Many white Confederate refugees, like Clara Dargan, had longed to return home, only to experience profound disappointment, despair, and alienation upon their return. Financial uncertainty and a decimated transportation infrastructure imperiled their return home. For many black North Carolinians, the Confederacy’s demise did little to transform their immediate humanitarian catastrophe, as the refugee camps continued to grow. Newly emancipated African Americans continued to seek protection in the small shadow of safety created by the occupying Union army. With only a small footprint in North Carolina, the army and the newly chartered Freedmen’s Bureau proved largely impotent in efforts to protect black and white Unionist refugees from violence and discrimination at the hands of former Confederates and slave owners. Officials with the thinly staffed Freedmen’s Bureau often demonstrated more interest in returning black refugees to agricultural labor than in meeting their immediate humanitarian needs. In their efforts to prevent black refugees from becoming dependent upon the government, Freedmen’s Bureau officials were unwittingly aided by recalcitrant white North Carolinians who sought to forcibly return African Americans to the plantation and reclaim land granted to black refugees, using the twin tools of law and violence to do so. Unwilling to surrender the gains made during the war, African Americans resisted efforts to break up refugee communities and curtail their mobility, maintaining that freedom of movement was a hallmark of their freedom. As in earlier phases of the refugee crisis, black political mobilization was fundamentally intertwined with their physical mobility.2
For Clara Dargan, the journey home marked the end of her experience as a refugee. In her absence, her home had been radically transformed, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Many white refugees shared Dargan’s longing for home and disappointment when they eventually returned. When Lavinia Roberts, a refugee from New Bern, returned home in April 1865, she discovered that her house had burned to the ground. “Not even the ashes of my old home remained,” she noted years later, as “the provident Yankees had gathered them up with the bricks from chimneys, basement, wine cellar, and even from the pavement in the street. The very earth had been carried, so that where flowers and shrubs once grew, was a stagnant pond.” The daughter of a wealthy planter and wife of an equally wealthy lawyer, Roberts had been accustomed to a life of “ease and luxury.” Forced to flee in 1862 during the Burnside invasion, she had lived for three years on a modest farm in Warren County, where she with her children were “generally hungry, our clothes had been thread-bare, and we had many trial and tribulations.” Despite her difficulties as a refugee, returning home proved even more challenging. Arriving nearly penniless, she “began life over again.”
With only sixty cents in her pocket, she rented two rooms for herself and her eight family members, “one to sleep in, one to live in.” Included among that number was her husband, Frederick Roberts, who had been discharged with tuberculosis from his service in the Fifth North Carolina Cavalry in 1863. Lavinia described her husband as “a war wreck, broken down in health and spirits.” Their five children, three of whom had been born while their mother was a refugee, were all ill; her oldest son died less than a week after the family’s return to New Bern. Lavinia Roberts blamed her son’s death on the twenty thousand black refugees expelled from Sherman’s army a few months earlier, many of whom took up residence in James City, just across the river from her home. When smallpox broke out among them, they “were allowed to walk the streets of New Bern with the disease in all its stages [and] took great pleasure in rubbing against the white people.” Of her family’s own slaves, now free, only one remained, whom Roberts described as a “young, incompetent, and indifferent servant.” The Robertses had left their other former slaves in Warren County, as they had “no money to pay the traveling expenses of the servants.”
Like many white refugees in the North Carolina Piedmont, Lavinia Roberts had yearned since leaving New Bern in 1862 for the opportunity to return home and reestablish the life she had led prior to the war. As someone who “loved the old South,” she longed for “the ease, the comfort, the refinement, the culture we once enjoyed.” What she found instead was a set of challenges just as difficult as any she faced when she was a refugee. “With bowed heads and aching hearts,” Roberts wrote of her return to New Bern, “we began the battle of life again.”3 For almost all refugees, regardless of race, class, or gender, the cessation of hostilities rarely resulted in an uncomplicated return to their antebellum lives. Instead, it created a new chapter of the refugee experience. Many refugees, like Lavinia Roberts, attempted to return home, only to find that the home they had dreamt of for years no longer existed. Other refugees saw the end of the war as an opportunity to create a new life for themselves, sometimes making their refugee homes permanent. The variety of postwar experiences suggests that the Civil War refugee crisis did not end with the Confederate surrender but commenced a new phase in which refugees had to make difficult decisions about where and how to rebuild their lives.
Like Lavinia Roberts and Clara Dargan, most white refugees returned to their homes at the end of the war, although many found their homes transformed. Even those whose houses remained intact found that the homes they returned to bore only passing resemblance to the homes they had left. Only ten years old when she became a refugee, Ellen Bellamy was still becoming accustomed to her family’s new home when she was forced to leave it. When the war began, her family had recently moved into an enormous Greek revival mansion in downtown Wilmington. Completed only weeks before the attack on Fort Sumter, the mansion featured twenty-two rooms, replete with modern amenities, including running hot and cold water and gas chandeliers. Her father, Dr. John Bellamy, a wealthy physician and landowner, had advocated secession and had chaired the welcoming committee when Jefferson Davis visited Wilmington in May 1861. Ellen Bellamy had left Wilmington with her family in September 1862, moving to Floral College in Robeson County, where they lived with other Wilmington refugees. Her parents believed that they would be safer there from both the threat of Union invasion and yellow fever. Unlike most refugees, the Bellamys periodically returned to their Wilmington mansion. After the occupation of Wilmington in February 1865, her parents’ vacant home had been commandeered as Union headquarters. When the Bellamys attempted to return to Wilmington in September 1865, they found that their house remained occupied by Federal soldiers, including Gen. Joseph Hawley, an abolitionist and one of the founders of the Republican Party in Connecticut. Neighbors who had stayed in Wilmington told the Bellamys that their home had been defiled by raucous interracial parties held in the mansion. “My parents . . . repeatedly tried to get possession of their home,” Bellamy later wrote, “to no avail.” On one visit, the Bellamys felt humiliated to be stopped at the front door by a “nigger soldier” and then “entertained by Mrs. Hawley, in [their] own parlor.” When, months later, after Dr. Bellamy received a presidential pardon, they eventually reclaimed their house, the Bellamys found it in a deplorable state, with tobacco stains caking the floors and mantel. Even in her old age, Ellen Bellamy believed that their home retained some corrupting pollution from its temporary occupation. Although the physical structure remained intact, for Ellen Bellamy, it would never again be the same house.4
The return of white refugees such as Lavinia Roberts and Ellen Bellamy coincided with the return of Confederate soldiers. James Rumley, a Confederate sympathizer who stayed in Beaufort during its Union occupation, noted in his diary in May 1865 that both Confederate soldiers and refugees “whom we have not seen for three year past, appear daily in the streets . . . as they did in better days.” In New Bern, Wilmington, Beaufort, and other sites on the North Carolina coast, white refugees and former Confederate soldiers came home to communities occupied (and largely dominated) by Union soldiers and black refugees. When the Northern journalist Whitelaw Reid visited coastal North Carolina in early May 1865 as part of a government delegation to assess conditions in the postwar South, he observed the tensions created by the interaction of black and white refugees, returning soldiers, and Union soldiers. In Wilmington, Reid noted that the streets were filled with white “refugees from the late theatre of military operations.” One family walked alongside a “crazy cart, with wheels on the eve of a general secession,” pulled by an ill-nourished horse and carrying “tables, chairs, a bedstead, a stove, and some frying pans.” White refugees, Reid believed, “seemed hopeless, and in some cases, scarcely knew where they wanted to go.” He also observed that many black refugees had congregated in Wilmington, most of them arriving within the previous few months, as Union occupation provided protections unavailable on the coastal plantations outside the city. Their plight was complicated by the “constant return of old proprietors, and the general confusion and uncertainty as to the ownership of real estate.” Many black refugees told Reid that they lived in fear of white violence and of reenslavement once Federal soldiers left.5
Most of the black refugees Reid encountered in Wilmington had only recently arrived in the city, entering after its Union capture in February 1865. When Reid visited New Bern, he encountered black refugees who had lived in refugee communities for more than three years. He described the Trent River settlement (now James City) as a “remarkable city of log cabins, outside the city limits, which now really form the most interesting part of the ancient town of Newbern.” He noted that while New Bern had an antebellum population of between five and six thousand people, “these newly-built cabins on the outskirts, alone, contain over ten thousand souls.” When Reid visited during the first week of May 1865, he noted that very few of the city’s antebellum white residents remained, claiming that New Bern had been “deserted by its former inhabitants, and filled by Union refugees from all parts of the State.” Reid observed, however, that these wartime conditions were rapidly changing with the cessation of hostilities. During the same week that Reid visited, “men, whose faces have not been seen in Newbern for nearly four years, are beginning to appear again, with many an anxious inquiry about property.” According to Reid, these returning soldiers and white refugees expected to find their property “to have been carefully preserved for them during their hostile absence.” As in Wilmington, Reid observed that more often than not, New Bern’s returning white residents found their homes occupied by Union soldiers and black and white refugees.6
Many out-of-state refugees stayed in North Carolina because they could not return home or knew that there was little left for them there. By the end of the war, Tennessee refugees James and Margaret Ramsey had lived near Charlotte since 1864. Cut off from their home in Knoxville, Dr. Ramsey complained that “we knew nothing of the large property we had left in Tennessee.” Nearly penniless and desperate for any information about his home, Ramsey had throughout the war sought out any scrap that could offer insight. From rumors gathered from “the banished members of my household, from other exiles and refugees,” and from the occasional Union newspaper that slipped through the lines, he learned that “the property was either burnt or destroyed or lawlessly sold, alienated or confiscated.” Even if he wanted to return to his Tennessee home, it is unclear whether he had the means to do so. The formerly wealthy planter and physician and his wife had been reduced to “our joint fortune of forty-two dollars . . . on which to start the world again.” At sixty-eight years of age, Ramsey worried not only about how he and his wife would support themselves but also about his children, who had also been impoverished by the war: “Our daughters were not better provided for. Our four surviving sons were equally penniless.” Although many formerly wealthy Southerners found themselves relatively impoverished at the end of the war, for refugees like Ramsey, their distance and isolation from home made their pecuniary dilemmas that much more vexing. “We were in North Carolina among strangers and many of them as much impoverished as ourselves,” Ramsey later noted. “What was best to do? This was the question now to be solved.”
Margaret Ramsey shared her husband’s despair and anxiety about their situation at the end of the war. Two weeks after Johnston’s surrender at Bennett Place, Margaret Ramsey compared their plight to that of the Babylonian exile: “Like the Jews when they were in captivity how we have yearned for our homes—‘By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down, yea, we went when we remembered Zion.’” Like her husband’s, Margaret Ramsey’s sadness was mingled with confusion about where and how to live. “Everything in confusion,” she wrote in her diary, “don’t know what we are to do.” Accustomed to a life of luxury, she had been reduced to “teaching for my board.” She mourned for her distant Knoxville home that existed now only in memory. Once, while walking near her refugee home near Charlotte, she found herself in a place that reminded her of home. Overcome by emotion, she “sat down on a stump and gave vent to my feelings.” In her mind, she could see her “beautiful home” with its “large and stately trees,” along with images of fields, rivers, and majestic bluffs. “All of these I was once mistress of,” she wrote, barely able to contain her tears. “Now the old mansion,” she lamented, “is in ashes.”
As much as they missed their home in Knoxville, the Ramseys decided to remain near Charlotte. Although Knoxville rested only across the Smoky Mountains from where they now found themselves, the Ramseys believed that they could not afford the journey. Shortly after the Confederate surrender, they decided “that as we have not the means to get away from North Carolina we would stay where the waves of revolution and disaster had floated us. We were as badly wrecked as mariners can be if they are not drowned.” They were not the only refugees stranded in the North Carolina Piedmont at the end of the war; their neighbors included “refugees and exiles from New Orleans.” Like the Ramseys, these neighbors were “perfectly destitute.” With their property in Knoxville in limbo, tied up in convoluted court proceedings that dragged on for years, the Ramsey family remained in the Charlotte area, renting small residences that they numbered Exile’s Retreat No. 1 through No. 3. Although Dr. Ramsey returned to Knoxville periodically, primarily to participate in legal hearings to reclaim his property, he no longer felt at home there, the city having been transformed in their absence. Joined by their daughters after the war, the Ramseys lived modestly, rarely interacting with the local populace. Margaret Ramsey complained that “there is but little generosity here—the people have no sympathy for refugees and those who have lost all . . . no sociality—no friendship—no attention to strangers.” Despite their unhappiness in North Carolina, the Ramseys remained there until 1872, when they finally returned to Knoxville.7
While many wealthy white refugees chose to remain in North Carolina, especially in the Piedmont, so too did many African Americans who had been forcibly brought to the state by their owners. Freedom came to Milly Henry when she saw Union cavalry riding up Fayetteville Street in Raleigh. Henry had arrived in Raleigh a year earlier, having been brought from Mississippi by her owner, and rented out to a series of employers, the last of whom ran a boardinghouse. Years later Henry remembered that “de Yankees wus good ter me” but that in the immediate aftermath of the war, it “shore wus hard ter git a job.” In a 1937 interview conducted as a part of the New Deal WPA Federal Writers’ Program, Henry did not indicate why she stayed in Raleigh after the war. Her only known relative, her grandmother, had died in 1864 or 1865 in Mississippi, cutting her only meaningful tie to her native state. The interview transcript suggests that Milly Henry lived her entire life after emancipation in Raleigh, her home less than a mile from the site where she first saw Union soldiers.8
Although Milly Henry decided to remain in Raleigh, many African Americans in the North Carolina Piedmont, both natives and refugees alike, celebrated the Union victory and emancipation by exercising their ability to relocate, leaving their former masters and plantations. Controlling black mobility had been one of the defining features of slavery. For many freedmen and freedwomen, leaving their former owner’s gaze without a pass proved the first tentative test of their freedom. By heading out on the road, former slaves placed physical and symbolic distance between themselves and their lives in bondage. A Freedmen’s Bureau official in North Carolina observed that “to be sure of their freedom, many [freedmen] thought they must leave the old scenes of oppression and seek new homes.” For many black refugees, returning home was less of a priority than finding lost family members. In May 1865 the journalist Whitelaw Reid observed that dozens of black refugees in Wilmington were “hunting up children and wives, from whom they had been separated.” A few months later in Concord, John Dennett, another Northern journalist chronicling the South after the war, “met a middle-aged negro plodding along, staff in hand, and apparently very footsore and tired.” He had been sold away from his family just as the war was beginning, and “as soon as he learned he was free determined to return to North Carolina to try to find his wife and children.” By the time he met Dennett, he had journeyed for nearly two months and walked more than six hundred miles. In the quest to reunite with lost family members, many African Americans relied on newspaper advertisements. In March 1866 Augustus and Lutitia Bryant of Augusta, Georgia, placed an advertisement requesting information about the whereabouts of their five children, whom they had not seen since 1862. When last they had heard, their children had been taken to Charlotte, North Carolina.9
When Eliphalet Whittlesey, Freedmen’s Bureau assistant commissioner for North Carolina, arrived in Raleigh in June 1865 to assume control of “all subjects relating to ‘refugees, freedmen, and abandoned lands’” within the state, he found “hundreds of whites refugees and thousand blacks . . . occupying every hovel and shanty, living upon government rations, without employment and with comfort, many dying for want of proper food and medical supplies.” From his Raleigh headquarters, Whittlesey observed that these were not static populations but that refugees, “both white and black, were crowding into the towns, and literally swarming around every depot,” in desperate need of government aid. Whittlesey observed that the distribution of rations by the Freedmen’s Bureau caused them to be “besieged from morning till night by freedmen, some coming many miles on foot.”
Whittlesey claimed that his primary aim was “to aid the destitute, yet in such a way as not to encourage dependence.” He ordered bureau agents to distinguish between those “really deserving” rations from the “throng of beggars” in search of a handout, instructing them to deny rations to those able to work. Under Whittlesey’s supervision, “the homeless and helpless [black refugees] were gathered in camps, where shelter and food could be furnished.” New refugee camps were established in Raleigh, Greensboro, Salisbury, and Charlotte. Freedmen’s Bureau agents clearly intended these camps to exist only as temporary measures. At the “Freedmen’s camp” in Salisbury, “the negroes are quartered in comfortable shanties,” but were denied rations unless physically unable to work. Although “quite a large number [of black refugees] are received every day,” they were allowed to stay only until “proper employ is obtained for them,” such that “none may go there with expectation of remaining in idleness.”10
Freedmen’s Bureau agents in the North Carolina Piedmont struggled to implement Whittlesey’s contradictory instructions to provide aid but avoid dependence. For Capt. John C. Barrett, a Union soldier from Indiana and a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Charlotte, African Americans’ postwar migrations initially suggested chaos. Barrett noted in a letter to Whittlesey that “the whole population of Blacks were completely wild . . . straggling over the country in search of freedom.” He soon realized, however, that many African Americans in or near Charlotte were not native to the area but had been brought there during the war by their refugee owners. Although empowered to provide transportation for black refugees within North Carolina, Barrett did not have the authority under Freedmen’s Bureau regulations to provide for those traveling to other states. By midsummer 1865 Barrett observed that fifteen to twenty black refugees arrived in Charlotte daily en route to South Carolina and Georgia, few of whom had the means to make it home. Indeed, Barrett estimated that Charlotte had more than five hundred homeless black refugees from eastern North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, and across the former Confederacy. Barrett established a refugee camp on the outskirts of Charlotte to house these indigent refugees. Like many other Freedmen’s Bureau agents, Barrett worked diligently to limit black refugees’ dependence on government assistance, especially those able to find work and housing elsewhere. However, despite his concerted efforts, the refugee camp remained open until at least May 1866.11
At the same time that Barrett supervised the opening of new black refugee camps in the Piedmont, other Freedmen’s Bureau officials pressed for the closing of the established refugee settlements in coastal North Carolina. In September 1865 Dr. M. K. Hogan, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s surgeon in chief for North Carolina toured the black refugee camps in eastern North Carolina. Like many Freedmen’s Bureau officials, Hogan feared that black refugees would become dependent on the government and believed that refugee camps should either become permanent, self-sufficient settlements or be disbanded. At the Trent River settlement he found five thousand refugees living “as a town, with streets, &c. . . . in good comfortable log houses,” only one thousand of whom were receiving government rations. Although James City, as many of its residents now called the Trent River settlement, remained one of the most populous communities in the state, almost half of its wartime population had left. When Hogan visited other mainland camps, he also found that they had become largely depopulated. The colony on Roanoke Island remained robust, though smaller than its wartime apex, with approximately thirty-five hundred refugees, mostly composed of soldiers’ families. Hogan noted that twenty-two hundred refugees on Roanoke received government rations but that the majority of these were children under the age of fourteen. Although Hogan approved of the progress that black refugees had made in becoming independent of the government dole, he worried about the alarming number of black refugees who suffered from “intermittent and remittent fevers,” noting that they had little access to proper medical treatment.12
Despite the Freedmen’s Bureau’s efforts to close refugee camps in coastal North Carolina, black refugees and Northern aid workers struggled to maintain civic institutions established during the war. Schools remained the backbone of the black refugee communities in eastern North Carolina. In October 1865 Eliphalet Whittlesey reported that North Carolina had sixty-three black schools serving 5,624 students. Of these sixty-three schools, at least half were located in refugee communities. One Roanoke Island teacher observed the zeal with which her students learned geography, “their favorite study.” The subject undoubtedly had special meaning for a class made up of refugees who were now considering where to live in the postwar world. While maintaining schools remained a priority for black political leaders, so too did working for political and economic equality. Held in Raleigh’s African Methodist Church in September 1865, the North Carolina Freedmen’s Convention brought more than one hundred delegates from thirty-four counties. Although the delegates advocated for suffrage, the right to testify in court and serve on juries, and other political rights, they proclaimed that “our first and engrossing concern in our new relation, is how we may provide shelter and an honorable subsistence for ourselves and [our] families.”13 With North Carolina’s black population in a state of flux, the delegates to the Freedmen’s Convention recognized the importance of securing homes in establishing and maintaining freedom.
As in other parts of the former Confederacy, Freedmen’s Bureau officials in North Carolina attempted to restrict postwar black mobility, urging African Americans to establish agricultural labor contracts, often with their former owners. They were particularly keen to push African Americans out of urban areas and back onto plantations. White North Carolinians also sought to place significant restrictions on black mobility. The black code established by North Carolina’s first postwar legislature included several provisions limiting African Americans’ freedom of movement, including a vagrancy provision that provided for fines, imprisonment, and hard labor at a workhouse.14 The persistence of black mobility in the face of these twin threats suggests the extent to which freedmen and freedwomen saw the freedom of movement as a hallmark of emancipation.
Returning white refugees in eastern North Carolina asserted their claims to the land on which black refugee camps were built. Many black refugees assumed that they owned their homes and the plots on which they were built. This belief was particularly present in James City and Roanoke Island. In both locations, black refugees had constructed communities based on the promises made by Horace James and other Union officials that the settlements were permanent. Indeed, from the beginning of the Union occupation of eastern North Carolina, questions about legal title to land and property remained ambiguous, especially with respect to the parcels on which the refugee communities were built. Horace James himself had repeatedly used language throughout the war that suggested that black refugees owned the land on which they lived, noting in an annual report that they were “absolute owners of the soil.”15 Despite his public statements, James also made concerted efforts to purchase the land on which the refugee camps were built from its prewar owners. At the end of the war, the Freedmen’s Bureau inherited this legal ambiguity. Under President Andrew Johnson’s generous and largely indiscriminate amnesty policy, landowners in eastern North Carolina asserted their ownership, claiming that black refugees were squatting on their land and demanding that the Freedmen’s Bureau aid them in collecting rents.
On Roanoke Island, Freedmen’s Bureau officials discovered that the refugee camp, now stretching over more than one thousand acres, was built on land owned by twenty-five different parties. Starting in July 1865, these antebellum owners began asserting to Freedmen’s Bureau officials that they rightfully owned the land. Foremost among them was Isaac Meekins, whose homestead formed the heart of the refugee community, housing not only black refugees but a delegation of missionary teachers from the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, who had built a school on the property. Meekins demanded that the property be turned over to him, refusing offers by both the Freedmen’s Bureau and the National Freedmen’s Relief Association to purchase the land. In October 1866, more than a year after Isaac Meekins began lobbying, the Freedmen’s Bureau officially recognized his legal title. Buoyed by Meekins’s successful efforts, other white property owners on Roanoke Island began pressing for return of their property. The long occupation by refugees had transformed a section of Roanoke Island from thinly populated farmsteads to a densely populated and developed town. This transformation was documented by one white property owner who noted, “My land was taken for the benefit of freedmen when they sought Roanoke Island as a place of refuge; was laid off into acre lots, streets opened, and cutting the timber, they built several houses, which they continue to occupy.”
Facing pressures from white landowners who wanted to reclaim their land and from Freedmen’s Bureau officials in Washington who wanted to limit black refugees’ dependence on government, local Freedmen’s Bureau agents struggled to reduce the refugee population on Roanoke Island. Increasingly, bureau agents limited access to rations, hoping to induce able-bodied refugees to leave the island in search of employment on the mainland. By May 1866 rations were distributed to only two hundred of the fifteen hundred black refugees on the island. Although Roanoke’s refugee population had declined significantly since the end of the war, many bureau officials complained that their dispersal had not progressed rapidly enough. In June 1866 Whittlesey ordered that bureau agents “clear the island at once.” Despite these pressures, the remaining black refugees on Roanoke steadfastly refused to leave the island. Many believed that they owned the land on which they had been living since 1863. In the same month that Whittlesey ordered the refugee camp vacated, a Union official reported that “most of the freedmen believe the lands upon which they live are their own, or that the government will yet give them land.” Others feared “the oppression & injustice of their old masters” on the mainland. Rumors of violence perpetrated against former slaves were rampant on Roanoke. Indeed, one refugee who had recently left the island had been “shot down in cold blood,” his family returning to Roanoke after his murder. “Is there any wonder,” noted one Northern teacher who remained on the island, that “they hesitate about leaving a place of safety?” By January 1867 the population of the refugee colony had declined to 950, 17 of whom received government rations. In May 1867 Gen. Nelson A. Miles, Whittlesey’s successor as the Freedmen’s Bureau’s assistant commissioner for North Carolina, ordered the Roanoke Island settlement broken up, putting a final end to the refugee community that had begun there more than five years earlier.16
At James City, black refugees also engaged in a lengthy fight to keep land and homes they had concluded to be rightfully and legally their own. As in Roanoke and other black refugee sites, Freedmen’s Bureau agents tried to encourage James City residents to leave by cutting off rations. Many local whites favored breaking up the settlement. In April 1866 the New Berne Daily Times argued that “in the Trent River Settlement . . . there are about two thousand darkies, nearly all of whom are dependent on the government. . . . All such should be driven out of the camp and made to support themselves.” By February 1867 the population of James City had been reduced to 1,760. In October 1867 a North Carolina Freedmen’s Bureau official noted that “since the last annual report all the colonies have been broken up and the properties upon which they are settled restored to the owners. This has been accomplished by gradual, systematic measures resulting in no disadvantage or suffering to the former occupants.” This statement was not entirely true, as the James City settlement remained. The Freedmen’s Bureau ended all aid to the residents of James City by the end of 1868, effectively ending the federal support for black refugees that had begun in 1862.17
The legal fight over the property on which James City was built dragged on for decades. The Evans family claimed ownership of the land on which James City was built. Freedmen’s Bureau officials pleaded with the Evans family to sell the property to the black residents of James City, only to be rebuffed. Many of James City’s residents refused to accept that they did not own the land on which many of them had been living since 1863, insisting that they had been given clear title to the properties that they had worked and improved. Until 1880 the legal status of the James City property remained in limbo. Although the Evans family and the black residents claimed ownership, neither pressed their case in court. In 1880 the Evans family sold the James City property to the Bryan family of New Bern, who began to demand rents from its residents. James City residents offered the Bryan family $2,000 to purchase six hundred acres of land, which they refused. When efforts to collect rents proved difficult, the Bryan family attempted to evict the black families that had been living in James City for nearly two decades. The residents of James City vigorously defended their claim to the land in court, delaying final judgment until 1891, when the state supreme court ruled in favor of the Bryans. Threatened with eviction, the residents of James City signed leases with the Bryans.18
As the case of James City suggests, the Civil War refugee crisis did not end with Confederate surrender. Many refugees struggled for years to reestablish lives and homes. Recognizing the size and severity of the refugee crisis during the American Civil War should force historians to reconsider how they conceptualize the Confederate home front. In North Carolina and across the Confederacy, the Civil War drove civilians to leave their homes, with some running away from and others toward the front lines. It shattered the traditional Southern attachment to place, one that emphasized the connection between family and community. Acknowledging the Civil War refugee crisis should push scholars to reevaluate what Confederate soldiers meant when they wrote in their diaries that they were fighting for their homes and families, when so many of their families were far from home. For many Confederate soldiers and refugees, home had become an abstraction rather than a physical place. For black refugees who fled to Union lines, the war also redefined the meaning of home. Abandoning their plantation homes, places of bondage and domination under slavery, black refugees created new homes as bastions of freedom.19
The refugee crisis took on many different faces: the experiences of fugitive slaves on the North Carolina coast, refugee students at female academies in the Piedmont, and refugee planters in the North Carolina mountains diverged on more points than they shared. The diversity of refugee experiences within the Civil War South—black and white, enslaved and free, Confederate and Unionist—reveals a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Taken together, the picture that emerges exposes a humanitarian crisis driven by mobility, shaped by unprecedented economic pressures and disease vectors, and exacerbated by Confederate and Union governments unwilling or unable to provide meaningful relief. The complexity of the refugee crisis in North Carolina and across the Confederacy suggests that the traditional distinctions between the home front and the military front were illusions. Just as Union and Confederate armies traversed the Southern landscape, so too did refugees. Their dynamic mobility destroyed the human geography of the Old South and proved instrumental in both emancipation and Confederate defeat. Even those refugees who sought to isolate themselves from the Civil War could not detach themselves from its reach.