The Practices of Emancipation: A Conversation with John Clegg and Alisea Williams McLeod

For many of the estimated 200,000 African American men who fought in the Civil War, enlistment in the Union Army was a path to freedom from enslavement. The Practices of Emancipation project at the Neubauer Collegium aims to deepen our understanding of these soldiers and to link their stories to those of the freed people who sought refuge in so-called “contraband camps” along the Union Army lines. The researchers and a group of students at the University of Chicago are using sophisticated digital tools to build a comprehensive, publicly accessible database and interactive map detailing the process of emancipation as it played out in movements of fugitivity and armed resistance. The new information will be immensely valuable to historians of the era and to genealogists tracing links back to nineteenth-century African Americans. In this podcast, two of the project’s leaders — John Clegg (Collegiate Assistant Professor of History and Harper-Schmidt Fellow, University of Chicago) and Alisea Williams McLeod (Assistant Professor of Humanities, Rust College; 2020–21 Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow) — reflect on their collaboration and the significance of their work.