The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War

In the opening days of the Civil War, three enslaved men approached the gates of Fort Monroe, a U.S. military installation in Virginia. In a snap decision, the fort’s commander “confiscated” them as contraband of war.

From then on, wherever the U.S. Army traveled, torrents of runaways rushed to secure their own freedom, a mass movement of 800,000 people—a fifth of the enslaved population of the South—that set the institution of slavery on a path to destruction.

In an engrossing work of narrative history, critically acclaimed historian Tom Zoellner introduces an unforgettable cast of characters whose stories will transform our popular understanding of how slavery ended. The Road Was Full of Thorns shows what emancipation looked and felt like for the people who made the desperate flight across dangerous territory: the taste of mud in the mouth, the terror of the slave patrols, and the fateful crossing into Union lines. Zoellner also reveals how the least powerful Americans changed the politics of war—forcing President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and opening the door to universal Black citizenship.

For readers of The 1619 Project—and anyone interested in the Civil War—The Road Was Full of Thorns is destined to reshape how we think about the story of American freedom.