About the Fugitive Federals Project

Welcome to Fugitive Federals, an exploration of one of the most dramatic human stories of the American Civil War. Here you will learn about the escape of more than 3,000 prisoners of war from locations deep inside the Confederate States of America.

It was an epic event, and on this website, you will find visualizations of its scope and scale. The mass prison breaks that took place in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina in 1864-1865 shook the Confederacy to its core and facilitated its military collapse.

It was also an intimate event that changed individual lives. Union soldiers, traveling at night in parties of 3-4 men, fanned out across the southern countryside and showed up on the doorstep of enslaved people’s cabins. Escaped prisoners survived because Black enslaved people and the families of White Confederate deserters and Unionist guerrillas risked their lives to provide food, shelter, clothing, and guidance across the landscape. Northern men traveled through a society that was disintegrating under the pressure of war: slaves were at war with their masters, women and children were engaged in violence, government no longer provided basic local security, and thousands of people were fleeing the ever-widening war zones.