On May 7, 1864, theMercury, a Raleigh, North Carolina, weekly magazine, published the first part of a novelette titled “The Refugee’s Niece.” The author, William D. Herrington, a soldier in the Third North Carolina Cavalry, claimed that his story was “Founded on Real Incidents of the War in North Carolina.” Herrington would later publish three other novelettes in theMercury, two of which, “The Captain’s Bride” and “The Deserter’s Daughter,” would eventually also be published as freestanding volumes. The titular refugee in Herrington’s story was “Mr. Holmes, a respectable citizen, and a true southerner at heart, who at the...

In February 1862 a band of fifteen to twenty slaves fled from their plantation along the Chowan River in northeastern North Carolina, boarded a small boat, and floated downriver toward the Albemarle Sound. The group, which consisted of men, women, and children, had heard about the Union occupation of Roanoke Island only days earlier. Union forces under the command of Gen. Ambrose Burnside had overwhelmed the nominal Confederate defenses, establishing a base from which they could move against the North Carolina mainland. The fugitive slaves also knew that slave owners in the region were beginning to remove their human property...

In the years to come, black refugees in eastern North Carolina would celebrate the first of January as the anniversary of the day Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1864 black refugees in Beaufort celebrated the “anniversary of our existence as citizens of the United States,” thanking God “for hearing our cry when in the house of bondage, and for opening to us the door of escape.”¹ In 1865 theOld North State, a recently commenced Unionist newspaper in Beaufort, described the “numerous celebrations … commemorative of the Emancipation Proclamation.” The largest celebration in North Carolina occurred in New...

Mary Bryan spent the morning of March 14, 1862, supervising slaves in the kitchen rather than preparing for her next three years as a refugee. Like many residents of New Bern, Bryan expected that Confederate defenders would be able to repulse the expected Union attack on the town and wanted to prepare extra dinners, hoping to feed the triumphant Confederate soldiers after the battle. Bryan had celebrated her twenty-first birthday only three days earlier. Married in 1859 to Henry Ravenscroft Bryan, a planter and lawyer, Mary Bryan had her first child, a son named Norcott, in 1860 and had recently...

In the spring of 1864, William M. Boylan feared for the safety of his human property. The owner of three cotton plantations in Yazoo County, Mississippi, Boylan recognized that the presence of Union gunboats on the Mississippi River posed a threat to his property and a potential lure for his slaves. He had heard accounts of slaves running away to secure their freedom. He resolved to relocate approximately five hundred of his slaves to central North Carolina, where he believed they would be safely isolated from Union forces. Milly Henry, an eight-year-old girl in the spring of 1864, was one...

When Greensboro Female College opened its doors for the fall term in July 1863, Rev. Turner Jones, the school’s president, proudly proclaimed that “every room in the building was engaged, many applications for rooms by letter, had been declined, and quite a number, who applied in person for admission, were under the necessity of returning home. A large faculty had been secured.” Over the previous two years, the school’s enrollment had doubled, now exceeding 240 students, with many of them coming from war-torn parts of the Confederacy. A local newspaper observed that the school flourished “mid the ravages of war,...

When Katherine Polk Gale arrived in Asheville in the summer of 1863 via stagecoach, she breathed a sigh of relief, hoping that her long refugee odyssey might finally be at an end. She proclaimed that “the drive up the lovely French Broad river was charming the scenery was beautiful; peace & plenty ruled everywhere; the country was shut in from the world, it seemed almost impossible for the desolations of the war to reach the happy homes along the route.” With three children in tow, all under the age of three, Katherine Polk Gale was exhausted from nearly two years of...

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...