The path to freedom for African-Americans in the South was not as simple as a march to Union lines or a wait for emancipation.
It took many twists, had a few U-turns and led not to the Promised Land but to a new set of challenges.
That's part of what comes across in Visualizing Emancipation, an interactive online map created by the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab.
The map plots more than 3,000 emancipation-related events from 1861-1865 in 10 categories that range from government actions to abuse of African-Americans. An additional 50,000 entries show Union troop locations during the Civil War, making it easy to see the impact of opportunity on an animated timeline of the war years.
"It tells us that the end of slavery was this really complicated process that happened all over the South, but more in some places than others during the war," said Scott Nesbit, associate director of the lab.
"The chance for freedom came about on water and on rails. That's where the Union troops were. But at some places in the South, people remained enslaved the entire war, long after the Emancipation Proclamation.
"And, just because you get to Union lines doesn't mean you're going to start having a good time. These first years of freedom, if we can even call it that, were filled with coercion and danger. ... (In the contraband camps,) African-Americans were treated as essentially free, as free as someone can be who is impressed into service by the military and not allowed to leave."
Edward L. Ayers, UR president and co-leader of the project as a historian of the American South, elaborated in an announcement of the new website.
"Emancipation did not happen on just a few days, by a single document, or on a fixed field of battle," Ayers said. "It came around the edges of the story. It started before the war began and ended long after the smoke cleared. It happened on dark roads and in formal government documents. It started, stopped, raced forward and cut back."
The university received a $48,155 grant for the project in 2010 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Students helped to search through military records, newspapers, wartime letters and diaries to find emancipation events.
"When we first started," Nesbit said, "we thought we would want to find places where people were becoming free. When we started looking at the evidence, we realized it was never clear when or where that happened. Rarely could we look at any piece of evidence and say, 'Aha, these people became free!'
"It led us to begin thinking of emancipation as much more complicated, filled with somewhat contradictory events."
Thus, the categories for events include fugitive slaves, African-Americans helping the Union, African-Americans captured by Confederates (which often led to re-enslavement), African-Americans captured by Union soldiers, African-Americans conscripted by both armies and abuses of African-Americans.
"Atrocities, absolutely they occurred," Nesbit said, "more at the hands of Confederates than at the hands of Union soldiers, but certainly on both sides. ...
"What's really clear is that African-Americans bore the brunt of the war, simply because they were the most vulnerable people in society," he said. "The lack of food, the lack of protections - they felt the brunt of the war in all these ways."
Nesbit expects the emancipation map to evolve as scholars and the public contribute more examples of events that occurred along the path of freedom.
In its first few days of operation, mention on Civil War blogs and social media has attracted users from 30 countries.
"The absolute numbers are not as interesting," he said, "but a lot of people are coming from all over the world."
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