The Emancipation Moment Revisited

In his Fortenbaugh Lecture on "The Emancipation Moment," delivered in 1983, David Brion Davis asked how Martin Luther King, Jr., could have praised the Emancipation Proclamation in his address at the March on Washington as "a joyous daybreak" if African Americans were still struggling for freedom a century later. With characteristic erudition and creativity, Davis suggested that ancient patterns of manumission had influenced nineteenth-century antislavery mediations between immediacy and postponement by imagining the release from bondage as a rite of passage that initiated the long-term integration of the former slave into free society with the assistance of the former master. This durable model softened tensions between evangelical visions of abolition as a sudden religious deliverance and transnational efforts of political leaders—including Lincoln—to end slavery "by such a gradual, imperceptible process that there would be no distinct moment of emancipation." Davis argued that the Emancipation Proclamation owed its lasting prestige in part to the extent to which it resembled a classical manumission rite. "No other nation could honor a single Great Emancipator, whose words were analogous to those of a benign master who frees his slaves," Davis observed. "The symbolic emancipation moment" was more important than the text of the Proclamation because "it was an enduring moment of promise that would inspire new emancipators like Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a moment that would acquire new meaning as men and women continued to find new forms of oppression and human bondage." ¹

Marcus Wood takes Davis' identification of a transatlantic "emancipation moment" as the starting point for The Horrible Gift of Freedom, Wood's third monograph in the last ten years on representations of slavery and abolition in literature, the visual arts, museum exhibitions, and other forms. Where Davis described the Emancipation Proclamation as the purest realization of a prototypical end to slavery collectively imagined during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Wood highlights British legislation to end the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 as the template for a "cultural myth" (p. 15) reproduced with little alteration across Europe and the Americas from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. Where Davis found an enduring promise meaningful to King and subsequent champions of social justice, Wood sees a sinister gift that constrained African captives and their descendants even while pretending to restore their stolen freedom. He closely follows the writings of Franz Fanon, to whose memory the book is partially dedicated, in stressing that celebrations of emancipatory legislation foreclosed recognition of slave consciousness forged through a revolutionary struggle for liberation. Instead commemoration invested elites with a false but potent moral superiority as a result of their supposed benevolence. Although outraged by the tradition he outlines, Wood is not entirely without hope in the possibility of improvement. The strongest sections of The Horrible Gift of Freedom report on his immersion as an expert participant-observer in the bicentennial anniversary of the 1807 enactment. His reflections on British remembrance of that event offer a valuable resource for thinking about the upcoming sesquicentennial anniversaries of the Emancipation Proclamation and other milestones in the dismantling of slavery in the United States.

Wood's insistence on a relative uniformity in the international representation of emancipation prompts him to take up a wide variety of texts, images, and performances produced at different times and places. He begins with an informative iconographic history of the liberty cap, reaching the unsurprising conclusion that the French Revolution constituted a crisis in the career of the symbol. Similarly thoughtful and detailed is his discussion of the seal adopted by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, featuring an enchained, kneeling slave with clasped hands who asks, "Am I not a man and a brother?" A few of the mini-essays in the first half of The Horrible Gift of Freedom can strike the reader as half-hearted. For example, Wood takes a brief, disgusted look at accounts of the 1807 legislation in four influential...