Emilie Davis Thesis

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The American Civil War affected everyone from the highest class to the lowest slave. The repercussions resonated from around the divided nation. For Emilie Davis, she documented her daily life before, during and after the war. She lived with her brother and his wife and other family members as she led a simple working life as a servant. Though she was born a free black woman, she and other born free African Americans were at risk for being accused of being a runaway slave and forced to go down to the South as the Fugitive Slave Act was still in effect at the time. In addition to the fear of possibly being accused of being a runaway slave, the Civil War was edging closer and closer to her friends and family. Emilie feared that her father would be killed if the opposing armies met each other at Harrisburg or that he could be kidnapped and taken back down to the south as an enslaved man, as annotated in the novel by Judith Giesberg, Emilie Davis’s Civil War. …show more content…
Meanwhile, Emilie’s friends and her other family members also had to worry about the possibility of her brothers and other male friends being called to war as volunteers, being kidnapped and wrongly accused by Southern bounty hunters