The Civil War History Prize Selection Committee and Kent State University Press are thrilled to announce that Marcy S. Sacks is the winner of the 2025 John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article published in Civil War History in the past year. The article, “‘I Shall Forward to You My Contraband’: Tracing Coerced Wartime Black Movement North through an Incomplete Archive,” appeared in the December 2024 issue.
In this innovative and significant article, Marcy Sacks devotes sustained attention to a topic only hinted at in the scholarly literature and mostly obscured in the documentary record: formerly enslaved people involuntarily relocated to the North during the US Civil War. She performs an important work of archival recovery in revealing this dark undercurrent that accompanied the Civil War’s new birth of freedom. In exploring the ways in which US soldiers sought to extract people from the South and send them to friends and family in non-slaveholding states, Sacks provides a searing demonstration of the allure of mastery for some US soldiers and the steps they would take to secure servants. She further exposes soldiers’ hypocrisies when then congratulated themselves as emancipators even as they treated people as possessions.
Sacks’s methodologically sophisticated article is underpinned by her painstaking piecing together of clues scattered through the historical record, making visible what the perpetrators tried to hide. Particularly impressive is her interpretive skill in taking scraps from letters and other documents that may seem innocuous on their own, but together reveal the coercions used to transport Black men, women, and children away from their communities as well as the ways in which these people attempted to retake charge of their lives thereafter. Where the historical record is silent, Sacks draws on census records and other documents to speculate on the traumas experienced by Black people who left everything they knew in a bid for freedom, only to find themselves bound in another kind of unfreedom. Mobility was not, therefore, always a form of freedom. Sacks uncovers the practice of enforced location at a previously unsuspected scale, demonstrating the salient ways in which it shaped the unfolding of emancipation, encounters between US soldiers and fugitives from bondage, and the war’s effects on Union civilians. It is a highly thought-provoking piece.
Find the article on Project MUSE.
About the Winner
Marcy S. Sacks is the Julian S. Rammelkamp Professor of History at Albion College. She has written two books: Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I (2006) and Joe Louis: Sports and Race in Twentieth-Century America (2018). Marcy is currently writing a monograph about white Northerners’ encounters with the institution of slavery and Black Southerners during the Civil War.
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