Fugitive Federals
A Public History Investigation of Escaped Union Prisoners
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What is Fugitive Federals?
What is Fugitive Federals?
During the 1864-1865 winter, over 3,000 Union prisoners of war (POWs) escaped the clutches of the Confederacy and swarmed over the southern countryside “like the locusts of Egypt.” Their routes to freedom (or, more often, recapture) played out like some sick American version of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring: bloodhounds trained for generations to track and mutilate escaped slaves dogged their trails, the frozen earth and air relentlessly numbed their appendages and tested their resolve, the swamps and mountains teamed with vermin and briars that cut them open and made them sick, starvation sapped more energy every moment, and every human encounter could extend their survival or turn deadly in an instant. Every decision they made—where to go, who could hide them, guide them, or provide sustenance—carried the risk of violence and continued imprisonment. How do human beings make life-or-death decisions under such stressed environments and conditions? What impact did those decisions have on their wartime experience and postwar lives?
The five escaped prisoners pictured here were part of a party of sixty men that traveled through the mountains of North Carolina. Notice the clubs they carried to ward off dogs and to help them cross the terrain.
Photograph from Daniel Langworthy, Reminiscences of a Prisoner of War and His Escape (1915).
This illustration comes from fugitive Junius Henri Browne’s account of his escape in Four Years in Secessia (Hartford: O.D. Case and Company, 1865).
Using traditional historical research methods, Fugitive Federals seeks to answer those questions. The written records left behind by these POWs, their aiders and abettors, and their predators—thousands of diaries, memoirs, letters, biographical sketches, newspaper articles, military orders and correspondence, and provost marshal records—grant valuable insight into the thought processes of these men. Furthermore, understanding the world these men traveled through informs historical conclusions concerning the internal collapse of the Confederacy. These fugitives trusted networks of Black guides, Confederate deserters who organized to avoid conscription, and disloyal whites who sabotaged their government by helping POWs escape. Their unique perspective of the southern landscape and the ideologies of the people who live within it are invaluable, painting a vivid picture that the writings of an invading soldier could not.
Contending with the rigorous standards of cross checking primary evidence and engaging with the wider body of literature proved difficult, and initially narrowed the scope of the project to only around fifty soldiers—far from the nearly 3,000 names found within the written records. (Those fifty soldiers are explored in Lorien Foote's The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy.) To remedy this issue, two methodological adaptations ensued. First, the project was brought into university classrooms, serving as a framework to train students in historical research methodology. Students have compiled information on over 370 additional soldiers, multiplying the project's repository of data and helping to bolster several of Foote’s arguments. Second, all of the data collected for the project was georeferenced and mapped utilizing ArcGIS. The resulting maps revealed thousands of additional areas to test the project’s conclusions, and helped to uncover local variations in escaped fugitive’s decision making. The maps even opened up the possibility to tracking escape routes that POWs took to reach the safety of Union lines. While these maps may tell us where a POW’s decisions led them, there is still a long way to go before the points help us to understand the process behind those decisions.
This website serves as a repository for the data collected so far. Each tab provides valuable insight into the stories of these fugitive Federals, highlighting the routes they took, the dangers they faced, and the help they found along the way. Additionally, educational materials and outside resources are provided for any researcher looking to incorporate this information into their own classrooms and projects. Fugitive Federals is a massive undertaking, and educators are invited to contribute to this innovative project.
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