In the decades after the Civil War, African-descended people were on the move. Formerly enslaved people sought reunification with long-lost family members, opportunities to own land and to exercise their political rights, and refuge from the constraints of a social order that increasingly relied on race rather than status to organize society. Kendra Field’s new book offers her own family as a lens through which to examine this “series of unbound migrations” of people in the post-Emancipation era (137). Field traces the movement of three families of freedpeople, devoting a chapter to each, to reveal that there were often multiple migrations and to link western migration (to locales such as Indian Territory) with overseas migrations to Canada, Mexico, and especially Africa. She pushes back the timeline for the “back to Africa” movement so that it begins not with Marcus Garvey but with Chief Sam.
Field begins with Thomas Jefferson Brown,...
