A radical retelling of the drama of emancipation, from New York Times bestselling author and winner of the National Book Critic Circle Award 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—and declared them free men. 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...