A Carceral Diaspora: Freedmen in Northern Penitentiaries in the Age of Emancipation

Drawing from the records of military tribunals, military prisons, and state penitentiaries, this presentation traces the experiences of formerly enslaved persons as they moved through various carceral institutions throughout the country. During the US Civil War, thousands of freedmen were incarcerated by the Union Army’s justice system. Their imprisonment extended long after the conflict; individual southern states continued the Union Army’s practice of policing and criminalizing Black southerners. Just as the military deployed martial law to discipline freedmen through imprisonment and forced labor, southern states recaptured them and diverted their labor to public works on the ruins of the South. Unpardoned Black civilian prisoners of the military were transferred to penitentiaries in the North and Midwest—a phenomenon I call a “carceral diaspora,” the forced movement of freedmen between one prison to another and their subjection to changing authorities. This research provides new insights into the complex transition from slavery to freedom and foregrounds the North and the US Army’s complicity in the evolution of racial control mechanisms in the post-emancipation South.