Freedom's Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (review)

This is a book that might unfortunately be overlooked, because it is a tightly focused study of the efforts of freedpeople to win veterans' pensions after the Civil War. The title, however, suggests wider ambitions: the work uses pension records to examine how African American family life evolved from slavery. In this Freedom's Promise succeeds admirably, using a somewhat bureaucratic topic to raise timely broader issues.

In recent years, there has been a gathering reappraisal of the slave family. Herbert Gutman's reigning image of a patriarchal family structure has come under question by scholars like Deborah Grey White, Brenda Stevenson, and Noralee Frankel. The recent work suggests a more fluid understanding by slaves of how families functioned. The lack of legal sanction, among other things, made slave families diverge significantly from the Victorian ideal, or even from whites' actual practices. For the surviving relatives of United States Colored Infantry veterans to collect pensions, they had to convince Federal officials that they were legal wives and legitimate children, in circumstances where slavery complicated such expectations. Slavery's day-to-day realities included broken families, husbands living on other plantations, and wives fully participating in the work force and subject to male harassment. Furthermore, as Regosin observes, "former slaves' efforts to formalize family ties or to order their domestic affairs were also manifestations of the creation of their own citizenship" (7). Winning official sanction for African American family norms raised issues of considerable urgency—politically, practically, and emotionally.

While the insight that the slavery shaped black family life is familiar, this source is a relatively unexplored one, and in some respects it provides better evidence than the much more commonly used W.P.A. narratives. The pension documents are chronologically closer to emancipation and feature multiple testimony on the same events. Because the material is relatively fresh, the individual stories come through vividly. I have seldom seen such compelling evidence of how people negotiated the legal transition to freedom, as described in the recent work of Peter Bardaglio and Laura Edwards. The realities of black family life did not fit into the bureaucratic boxes of the Federal officials. For one thing, only legitimate children could inherit pensions, in circumstances where no legal marriage for slaves existed when most of these children were conceived. This circumstance presented a formidable semantic tangle, compounded by the fact that slaves often distinguished between informal cohabitation, or "take ups," and committed marriages. Ragosin is fairly appreciative of the Federal officials' efforts to apply the law in a flexibly humane fashion, but there was a fundamental disconnect between the freedpeople's social reality and the whole edifice of Victorian custom and Anglo-American law.

In sum, Elizabeth Regosin has written a fine short book on an engaging topic. Much digging in the National Archives clearly went into this work, and a great deal of thought as well. I hope the fifty-dollar price tag doesn't discourage people from reading it.