Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom ed. by William A. Link and James J. Broomall (review)

William A. Link and James J. Broomall’s lively new collection brings together ten essays that treat Civil War slave emancipation as a process. For the most part, the book’s contributors ignore policies like the Emancipation Proclamation for an analysis of individuals and institutions, and the relationships between them. Sometimes they make new contributions to older debates over, say, who freed the slaves and why. Sometimes they take the long view, placing their story in a broader geographic or temporal context. Sometimes they engage the problematic circumstances that facilitated black freedom or the troubling consequences that that freedom provoked. But whatever its particular focus, each essay helps advance the volume’s main point that emancipation was—to quote Laura F. Edwards in the epilogue—“one among many points in a much longer journey about what America would be without slavery” (252).

The editors divide the essays into three sections: the first looks at initial demands for emancipation during the Civil War, the second at clashes over its meaning immediately afterward, and the third at contests over its narration in the century and a half that followed. This organization, along with each author’s nominal attempt to engage other essays in the book, imposes a sense of coherence upon what is otherwise a diverse set of topics. Arguments occasionally conflict. More often they just coexist, with each piece illuminating a particular aspect of the black freedom struggle that troubles any notion that emancipation was an end point. In this volume, freedom was part of an ongoing fight.

Although the essays do not take a single position, certain themes are nevertheless apparent. One of them is the primacy of the state. In his essay on the U.S. military occupation in the South, Gregory P. Downs rejects the argument that the slaves freed themselves. He asserts instead that true black liberty—what he calls “practical freedom”—resulted from a “complex interplay between individual action and state coercion” (48). William A. Blair meanwhile chronicles the antidemocratic behavior of the military in Border South elections, demonstrating that the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was in large part a result of federal officers’ disfranchisement of Confederate sympathizers in 1863 and 1864. But while soldiers undertook the dirty work that helped create an antislavery Congress, elsewhere they subdued Indians. Carole Emberton asserts in her provocative essay that black freedom in the South signaled the dusk of sovereignty for Indians in the West, as an apparatus erected to crush secessionists was soon crushing indigenous people on the Plains. Justin Behrend’s case study of Concordia Parish, Louisiana, in 1876 also concludes that state power was inseparable from emancipation. Freedpeople there believed that the right to vote, to say nothing of the survival of federal authority in the region, was essential to keeping slavery in the past. Many of the essays in Rethinking American Emancipation ascribe enormous importance to state power. Sometimes, they show, the state promoted progress; other times it circumscribed possibilities; often it did both. But always it played a central role in the story of emancipation.

Another theme that threads through these essays is a focus on the varied ways that different Americans interpreted emancipation. Yael A. Sternhell’s chapter on wartime mobility illustrates how for blacks flight was an act of liberation while for whites it was an act of subjugation. Emberton’s work on U.S. imperialism in the West shows how “the meaning of freedom for some began to resemble a new kind of slavery for others” (127). And William A. Link’s study of memory in late nineteenth-century Atlanta reveals that racial discrepancies, particularly between blacks and whites, persisted for many decades. Whereas white Atlantans saw emancipation as an event liberating them from slavery’s old order, black Atlantans saw it as part of...