“Negroes Driven South By The Rebel Officers,” Harper’s Weekly,
November 8, 1862 If slaves were intent on gaining their freedom
in the American Civil War, southern slaveholders were just as
intent on keeping their human property. In late Fall 1862, now
that the Emancipation Proclamation had turned the Union Army
into effectively an army of liberation, it posed a mortal threat
to slavery, much more so than earlier in the war when many
federal commanders had pledged non-interference with the
peculiar institution. An obvious tactic that slaveholders used
when possible to counter the threat posed by the Union Army was
to move slaves away from federal forces’ advance, which became
known as “refugeeing.” The practice began even before the war’s
outbreak as some slaveholders relocated to remote places they
believed would be safer from northern invasion. Over the course
of the war, refugeeing became more and more common, especially
with Union Army’s move into the slave-dense Mississippi Valley.
Many planters there mov