I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era by David Williams (review)

Round and round we go. The historiographical question is “Who freed the slaves?” The answers are as definitive as they are diverse, and they come from the most accomplished of American historians. With signature clarity, James M. McPherson has claimed that Lincoln freed the slaves. With a few more words, Ira Berlin has maintained that the slaves ended up responsible for smashing their own shackles. More recently, Gary W. Gallagher has suggested that without northern soldiers’ love for the Union, emancipation would have been dead on arrival; therefore, the Union army was responsible for emancipation.

These battle lines are not new. In 1928, William E. Woodward wrote, “Negroes are the only people in the history of the world, so far as I know, that ever became free without any effort of their own.” W. E. B. Du Bois shot back that when it came to emancipation, “the United States government followed the footsteps of the black slave.”

In this debate, David Williams now offers the most robust case for African American “self-emancipation.” Having read widely in newspapers, diaries, letters, and speeches, he shows that from the years immediately preceding the war to the ones after it, African Americans in the North and the South consistently pushed for their liberation. Sometimes their actions were overt, whether in the form of Nat Turner’s rebellion or in Frederick Douglass’s editorials. Sometimes their behaviors were covert, whether in the form of breaking tools or misguiding owners and overseers. At each stage of the historical saga, Williams finds evidence of African Americans pushing for freedom, taking the edicts and actions of whites and transforming them into weapons of emancipation, and rushing to liberty wherever possible. Although at times it seems that Williams universalizes issues that other historians have worked hard to uncover as profoundly local and particular, such as acts of violence against masters, he nonetheless offers a profound corrective to Abraham Lincoln’s centrality in ending slavery. Williams has elegantly and forcefully, placed self-emancipation at the center of the entire story. I Freed Myself should take its place alongside The Union War and Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering as one of the most important books in recent Civil War studies.

I Freed Myself will not end the historiographical merry-go-round. The explanations for emancipation will continue, in part because the stakes were and are so high. Perhaps, however, it is time to ask not simply who freed the slaves, but why we have so many persuasive answers. In part, this may be simple: historical change is complicated. But on another level, addressing this may tell us more about the era of the Civil War and the many meanings of emancipation. The titanic battles occurred at a particular moment in time. Literacy rates were high, and American commercial printing reached new levels of production, distribution, and consumption. As Alice Fahs and others have detailed, newspapers (among them several affordable illustrated papers) and books circulated widely. Moreover, paper, pencils, pens, and ink were available; although soldiers routinely blamed their poor penmanship on faulty instruments, most did locate materials to express themselves across space and time. Many of those who could not read or write had their words and actions represented too, sometimes by terrified slave owners and sometimes by curious northern soldiers or nurses.

Many Americans sensed that the events around them were momentous. They endeavored to mark occasions by writing personally and by keeping their materials. Letters that in years past may have been thrown away were now kept. Decades after the war, librarians and collectors sought these letters and diaries; the precious papers of everyday women and men were placed in acid-free manila folders and tucked away in protected library stacks. Scholars and publishers produced edited versions of diaries and letters. Perhaps the most famous, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, won...