George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

The Richards Center community came together to workshop “Union Provost Marshals, Wartime Freedom Seekers, and Military Emancipation in the Civil War,” a section from pre-doctoral fellow Cooper Wingert’s forthcoming dissertation. Cooper’s dissertation explores how wartime freedom seekers and Union army provost marshals navigated civil-military tensions and brokered emancipation in the field, and in the process renegotiated and reinvented federalism in the United States. Provost marshals, the military police of the Civil War Era, were initially tasked with maintaining internal military discipline, but provosts’ careful watch over all civilians who entered and exited army lines put them into daily contact with enslaved people seeking freedom. By looking at the relationship between freedom seekers and Union provosts, his dissertation illuminates how the federal system shaped wartime emancipation, and in turn how the claims of enslaved people and the prerogatives of the Union military reshaped American federalism.