Lately I’ve been following one woman through the mess of “freedom” in the Civil War.

In my last post, I wrote about Harriet Jacobs in Alexandria — a Union-occupied city where Black families crowded into contraband camps, and where even the “good” Northern women helping them could not quite accept a Black woman like Jacobs as an equal. The law had moved. The map had moved. Hearts and habits were still dragging behind.

In the new post, I pick up the thread again as Jacobs heads south toward Savannah and the coastal Paradise of Port Royal; places where formerly enslaved families held land, planted for themselves, and sent their children to school, before the federal government took most of it back.

If you’d like to read them together:

Harriet Jacobs in Alexandria: Prelude to Paradise

Port Royal: From Paradise to Paradise Lost

Same war, same woman, two very different versions of “freedom.”