Civil War Refugees

Civil War Refugees

By Jack McGuire

Until recently I rarely thought of refugees in connection to our Civil War.   The battles of Bull Run, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Antietam and Gettysburg on the other hand were to me, powerful remembrances of that conflict.   Although once one takes into consideration battles don’t just randomly occur, that it required literally hundreds of thousands of men moving through towns and villages not always to loyal to their cause you begin to understand the problems of refugee’s.    You had former Northerners living in the South who were so fearful of being conscripted by the Confederates they packed up their belongings and moved back North.    African Americans who escaped from bondage added to this flow of northbound traffic.

Union officials viewed escaping slaves as contraband refusing to return them to their owners despite the provisions of the fugitive slave act.   Due to the influx of Black refugees government officials relocated thousands to contraband camps.    Some so called Southern Unionists fled north to escape Confederate harassment.    Another reason for fleeing was the Confederate Sequestration Act of 1861 permitting authorities to confiscate all property belonging to aliens residing in the Confederacy.   All of this along with fear of conscription in a Confederate Regiment caused many a loyal Union family to pack up and leave.

Confederates on the other hand became refugees to escape the indignities of Union occupation.  The population of Richmond Virginia actually doubled in the first year of the conflict.  As the ebb and flow of the war progressed into 1863 food shortages led many southerners to seek refuge elsewhere.

Whenever there was great movement of the armies as in Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania members of the African American community biggest fears for good reason was being returned to slavery.     While there is no evidence the Confederate’s high command ordered the capture of blacks some ranking officers obviously saw it as their duty to return them to the auction block.    Some Rebel units actually searched the fields and towns in search of human contraband.

In an article by Peter C. Vermilyea a graduate of Gettysburg College who serves as a scholarship director at his alma mater’s Civil War institute he describes an incident in which the Confederate Army captured Blacks in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, twenty-five miles southwest of Gettysburg.   Between thirty and forty black women and children who had been seized at Chambersburg were brought to town in wagons.     A Confederate chaplain and four soldiers guarded this caravan.  As the wagons moved through town the angry residents surprised the guards, disarmed them and locked them up in the town jail.  After the captured Rebels were freed they demanded $50,000 in compensation for the blacks who they claimed were their property.   When the town leaders refused the Rebels threatened to burn the town.    Fourteen of the blacks offered to give themselves up to spare the town, but the town leaders refused their offer.   The Rebels never did return so the town was spared.    The Greencastle incident may have been a happy ending but no less than fifty blacks from the county ended up in Southern slave markets.