Double funding success will tell the forgotten story of America’s Black refugee camps

Dr Kristen Treen from the School of English at the University of St Andrews has been awarded both an AHRC Catalyst Award and a Leverhulme Research Project Grant to develop two projects aiming to untangle narratives surrounding race, history and memory from the most conflicted time of America’s history.  

The American Civil War exerts a powerful hold on the cultural imagination. Associated with the formation of U.S. nationhood and a contentious monument culture, it appears at little risk of being forgotten. Yet the refugee crisis it precipitated is seldom commemorated. 

Dr Treen’s Leverhulme-funded project will focus on the experiences of Black refugees who fled slavery during the Civil War, and sought refuge at federal camps in Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C., among other states. Over three years it will explore the relevance of the term ‘refugee’ to the experiences of formerly enslaved people across the war-torn states, and the futures they sought to build for themselves. Asking how refugees’ mobility, refuge-taking, and acts of settlement shaped alternative commemorative approaches to the war, researchers on the project will uncover how these have been remembered, forgotten, or erased from public memory.  

Concentrating on specific refugee camps, including Camp Nelson (Kentucky) and ‘Contraband Camp’ (Washington, D.C.), it will enhance academic and public understanding of the country’s system of enslavement and Black networks of resistance and aid through extensive archival research, which will be shared through academic and public-facing publications, and innovative uses of exhibitions and digital mapping. 

Funding from the AHRC will support a sustained, two-year collaboration with Camp Nelson National Monument in Kentucky, the United States’ third largest recruitment centre for African American troops and a refuge for Black women and children searching for their freedom during the war. This research team will consider databases, overlooked primary and secondary sources, and archaeological materials to uncover untold stories of Camp Nelson’s refugees from slavery and their lives after the war. 

Through their Impact-focused work with Camp Nelson staff and members of the local community, including descendants of Black refugees and troops, the researchers will co-create innovative, community-engaged museum exhibits that share the hopes Black refugees placed in Camp Nelson and the challenges they met there, reflecting on the processes involved in commemoration and the creation of historical narratives. 

Dr Kristen Treen

Dr Treen said: “It is an unexpected honour to be able to lead two projects that will contribute to a growing collective understanding of the lives and commemorative legacies of the Civil War’s Black refugees from slavery, and support the work being done by heritage and community-run organisations to remember those legacies today.”