Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom
Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom

Author: Stanley L. Engerman

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 111

ISBN-13: 0807168629

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It is beyond dispute that slavery has always been abhorrent and, wherever it still exists, should be abolished. Where most scholarly writing on slavery in the past has concentrated on examining slaves as victims, recent writings have taken a more nuanced view of slavery in focusing on the slaves themselves and their cultural and psychological accomplishments in captivity. Also, studies of the system's profitability have shown that, from an economic perspective, slavery worked for the slaveholders and their society. In Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom, the distinguished scholar Stanley Engerman succinctly synthesizes current scholarship and addresses questions that are critical to understanding the nature of slavery: Why did slavery arise, and how, why, where, and when did it legally end? What impact did slavery have on the enslaved? Was the impact lingering or was it reversed by the provision of freedom? Engerman begins his study by discussing slavery from a global perspective. He reminds us of the ubiquity of slavery throughout the world, challenging the stereotype that it was only the American South's "peculiar institution." Using the same broad comparative and temporal approach to discuss emancipation, he shows how emancipation in the southern states, several decades after it began in other parts of the world, both differed from and mirrored abolition around the globe. Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom is an important confrontation with America's and the world's past and present. Both the breadth and depth of this brief, incisive treatise demonstrate why Engerman is considered one of America's most insightful and respected scholars.

Lincoln and Freedom
Lincoln and Freedom

Author: Harold Holzer

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2007-08-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780809327645

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Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation had officially gone into effect on January 1, 1863, and the proposed Thirteenth Amendment had become a campaign issue. Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment captures these historic times, profiling the individuals, events, and enactments that led to slavery’s abolition. Fifteen leading Lincoln scholars contribute to this collection, covering slavery from its roots in 1619 Jamestown, through the adoption of the Constitution, to Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. This comprehensive volume, edited by Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard, presents Abraham Lincoln’s response to the issue of slavery as politician, president, writer, orator, and commander-in-chief. Topics include the history of slavery in North America, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, the evolution of Lincoln’s view of presidential powers, the influence of religion on Lincoln, and the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation. This collection effectively explores slavery as a Constitutional issue, both from the viewpoint of the original intent of the nation’s founders as they failed to deal with slavery, and as a study of the Constitutional authority of the commander-in-chief as Lincoln interpreted it. Addressed are the timing of Lincoln’s decision for emancipation and its effect on the public, the military, and the slaves themselves. Other topics covered include the role of the U.S. Colored Troops, the election campaign of 1864, and the legislative debate over the Thirteenth Amendment. The volume concludes with a heavily illustrated essay on the role that iconography played in forming and informing public opinion about emancipation and the amendments that officially granted freedom and civil rights to African Americans. Lincoln and Freedom provides a comprehensive political history of slavery in America and offers a rare look at how Lincoln’s views, statements, and actions played a vital role in the story of emancipation.

Embattled Freedom
Embattled Freedom

Author: Amy Murrell Taylor

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1469643634

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The Civil War was just days old when the first enslaved men, women, and children began fleeing their plantations to seek refuge inside the lines of the Union army as it moved deep into the heart of the Confederacy. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more followed in a mass exodus from slavery that would destroy the system once and for all. Drawing on an extraordinary survey of slave refugee camps throughout the country, Embattled Freedom reveals as never before the everyday experiences of these refugees from slavery as they made their way through the vast landscape of army-supervised camps that emerged during the war. Amy Murrell Taylor vividly reconstructs the human world of wartime emancipation, taking readers inside military-issued tents and makeshift towns, through commissary warehouses and active combat, and into the realities of individuals and families struggling to survive physically as well as spiritually. Narrating their journeys in and out of the confines of the camps, Taylor shows in often gripping detail how the most basic necessities of life were elemental to a former slave's quest for freedom and full citizenship. The stories of individuals--storekeepers, a laundress, and a minister among them--anchor this ambitious and wide-ranging history and demonstrate with new clarity how contingent the slaves' pursuit of freedom was on the rhythms and culture of military life. Taylor brings new insight into the enormous risks taken by formerly enslaved people to find freedom in the midst of the nation's most destructive war.

South to Freedom
South to Freedom

Author: Alice L Baumgartner

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1541617770

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A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historianAlice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

Illusions of Emancipation
Illusions of Emancipation

Author: Joseph P. Reidy

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 519

ISBN-13: 1469648377

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As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.

Witness for Freedom
Witness for Freedom

Author: C. Peter Ripley

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780807844045

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This extraordinary record of the African American struggle for freedom and equality collects 89 exceptional documents that represent the best of the recently published five-volume Black Abolitionist Papers. In these compelling texts, African Americans tell their own stories of the struggle to end slavery and claim their rights as American citizens. (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

Beyond Freedom
Beyond Freedom

Author: David W. Blight

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0820351474

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This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postemancipation life as a new form of freedom, these essays develop the work of scholars who are looking at how belonging to an empowered government or community defines the outcome of emancipation. Some essays in this collection disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation. Others offer trenchant renderings of emancipation, with new interpretations of the language and politics of democracy. Still others sidestep academic conventions to speak personally about the politics of emancipation historiography, reconsidering how historians have used source material for understanding subjects such as violence and the suffering of refugee women and children. Together the essays show that the question of freedom—its contested meanings, its social relations, and its beneficiaries—remains central to understanding the complex historical process known as emancipation. Contributors: Justin Behrend, Gregory P. Downs, Jim Downs, Carole Emberton, Eric Foner, Thavolia Glymph, Chandra Manning, Kate Masur, Richard Newman, James Oakes, Susan O’Donovan, Hannah Rosen, Brenda E. Stevenson.

The Long Emancipation
The Long Emancipation

Author: Rinaldo Walcott

Publisher:

Published: 2021-04-16

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 9781478011910

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Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom, showing that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom became thwarted.

Slavery's Ghost
Slavery's Ghost

Author: Richard Follett

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-11

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1421402351

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President Abraham Lincoln freed millions of slaves in the South in 1863, rescuing them, as history tells us, from a brutal and inhuman existence and making the promise of freedom and equal rights. This is a moment to celebrate and honor, to be sure, but what of the darker, more troubling side of this story? Slavery’s Ghost explores the dire, debilitating, sometimes crushing effects of slavery on race relations in American history. In three conceptually wide-ranging and provocative essays, the authors assess the meaning of freedom for enslaved and free Americans in the decades before and after the Civil War. They ask important and challenging questions: How did slaves and freedpeople respond to the promise and reality of emancipation? How committed were white southerners to the principle of racial subjugation? And in what ways can we best interpret the actions of enslaved and free Americans during slavery and Reconstruction? Collectively, these essays offer fresh approaches to questions of local political power, the determinants of individual choices, and the discourse that shaped and defined the history of black freedom. Written by three prominent historians of the period, Slavery’s Ghost forces readers to think critically about the way we study the past, the depth of racial prejudice, and how African Americans won and lost their freedom in nineteenth-century America.

Troubling Freedom
Troubling Freedom

Author: Natasha Lightfoot

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0822375052

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In 1834 Antigua became the only British colony in the Caribbean to move directly from slavery to full emancipation. Immediate freedom, however, did not live up to its promise, as it did not guarantee any level of stability or autonomy, and the implementation of new forms of coercion and control made it, in many ways, indistinguishable from slavery. In Troubling Freedom Natasha Lightfoot tells the story of how Antigua's newly freed black working people struggled to realize freedom in their everyday lives, prior to and in the decades following emancipation. She presents freedpeople's efforts to form an efficient workforce, acquire property, secure housing, worship, and build independent communities in response to elite prescriptions for acceptable behavior and oppression. Despite its continued efforts, Antigua's black population failed to convince whites that its members were worthy of full economic and political inclusion. By highlighting the diverse ways freedpeople defined and created freedom through quotidian acts of survival and occasional uprisings, Lightfoot complicates conceptions of freedom and the general narrative that landlessness was the primary constraint for newly emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.