FLIGHT AND FIGHT

The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately bring freedom to enslaved people. In her new book Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (UNC Press, 2018), Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky, demonstrates how hard and in how many ways refugees from slavery had to fight to secure the freedom for which they yearned.

1 Your book’s title, Embattled Freedom, evokes the image of former slaves having to fight not only to obtain freedom, but to keep it. What do you mean by that?

A great misconception is that when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January