2nd Saturday Civil War Series: Borderland Freedom: African American Experiences during the Gettysburg Campaign
February 8 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
In Person in the Lincoln Gallery at ACFL&MH!
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No Account Required!
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9370579279
Meeting ID: 937 057 9279
Gettysburg was part of a precarious borderland during the nineteenth century. The Mid-Atlantic borderland was a fundamentally ambiguous space where slavery and freedom intermixed because enslavers were able to kidnap free people of color as fugitive slaves. Free people of color from Gettysburg and its surrounding environs learned from these experiences to protect themselves by hiding or fleeing when Confederate soldiers crossed the Mason-Dixon Line in 1863.
Confederate soldiers who kidnapped free people of color under the guise of retrieving “contrabands” in 1863 were mirroring but not quite replicating the actions of antebellum enslavers from Virginia and Maryland. Both upset the perceived division between slavery and freedom when they captured African Americans. However, the Civil War kidnappings took place in a different political context, illustrating the very real impact Black refugee movement had on Pennsylvania’s free people of color.
Rachael Barbara Nicholas is a PhD candidate studying nineteenth-century American history at West Virginia University. She has a B.A. in history and classics from Ohio Wesleyan University and an M.A. in public history from West Virginia University. Ms. Nicholas is currently the park historian at Gettysburg National Military Park. She was previously a seasonal park ranger (historical interpretation) at Gettysburg. She has also been a graduate instructor at West Virginia University, a research assistant for the National Digital Newspaper Program, and a graduate research associate for the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. Her first article was recently published in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. She is in the process of completing her dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Movement, Imagination, and the Changing Spaces between Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1861-1877.”