“The word contraband meant that even the soldiers and officers whose recent victories had won their freedom did not view them as people,” Morrow writes. Contemporaneously referred to as “contraband camps” by the Union, the Civil War–era history of colonies and villages like Roanoke has been largely left unexplored in nonfiction, let alone in fiction. In the immediate aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Marches have settled in a freedmen’s colony on Roanoke Island, along North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Morrow’s Marches face something altogether different. The original, white Marches, living in Concord, Massachusetts, strain primarily against the limitations of genteel poverty in the absence of their primary breadwinner. Send me updates about Slate special offers.īut that’s about where the similarities end.
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