AFRICAN AMERICANS FORGED FREE LIVES IN CIVIL WAR REFUGEE CAMPS
Armstrong learned through the grapevine that her kin might remain in Texas so, as she says in her interview, "away I goin' to find my mamma."
With the Civil Battle raving, she laid out with 2 baskets filled with food and clothes and a percentage of money, taking a trip greater than 1,000 miles by watercraft and after that stagecoach to Texas.
In Austin, she was caught and put for quote, protecting her flexibility just in the nick of time by showing her documents to the Texas official accountable of the public auction.
Armstrong eventually found her mom in the city of Wharton, some 150 miles southern of Austin, at a evacuee camp for African Americans.
Armstrong explained the get-together: "Lawd me, talk 'bout cryin' and singin' and cryin' some more, we certain done it."
Armstrong later on went on become a registered nurse in the Houston location, conserving numerous resides in the yellow high temperature epidemic of 1875.
WHAT WERE THE REFUGEE CAMPS LIKE?
A camp could hold anywhere from a couple of hundred to several thousand individuals, most of them residing in barracks or fabric camping outdoors tents.
The Union set up some of the camps, the first 2 in 1861 along the coast in Virginia and Southern Carolina, complied with by others in Kentucky and Tennessee and along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis, Missouri. Formally, they were called "contraband camps," because freed individuals were considered property seized from the Southern.
Another team of camps located mainly in the Southern behind Confederate lines was produced advertisement hoc by blacks themselves. (Cooper has posted an interactive map of the locations of the camps).
At a camp in Hampton, Virginia called Slabtown and later on the Grand Contraband Camp, African Americans built houses so sturdy the Union later on appropriated them to house soldiers.
There were also 4 black institutions in the camp, one which became the future website of Hampton College, among the premier traditionally black universities in the nation.
LIFE AS A REFUGEE
Problems in many of the camps were repulsive and illness was common. Black evacuees resided in continuous fear and terror of raids from southerly whites. At one point, the Confederate military plundered and shed Slabtown to the ground.
Whites also resided in the camps, most of them looking for sanctuary from the battle. They were treated in a different way from blacks. A rations list Cooper found for a camp in New Bern, North Carolina, shows that 1,800 whites received 76½ barrels of flour throughout 3 months in 1862-63. Throughout the same duration, the 7,500 blacks there received 19 barrels.
But despite the difficulties and oppression, Cooper says that the camps offered the previously enslaved individuals their first opportunity to enjoy flexibility, reunite as families and lay the groundwork for a brand-new culture and religious beliefs.
