Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph P. Reidy (review)

Recent decades have seen an explosion of scholarship on the history and legacy of emancipation in the United States. A wealth of regional and community studies, along with new investigations of the marriage practices, military service, institution-building efforts, activism, and bodily health of the formerly enslaved, has taught us much about how communities and individuals grappled with the dislocations, transformations, promises, and disappointments of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. In Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery, Joseph P. Reidy deftly synthesizes this vast body of scholarship and digs deep into an impressive array of archival sources to explore the varied ways figures across the country and from a range of backgrounds experienced emancipation during the Civil War.

To make his case, Reidy employs an exciting interpretive framework. Rather than hewing strictly to a linear chronology, Reidy organizes the nine chapters of his book thematically around “time,” “space,” and “home.” For Reidy, time, space, and home serve as categories of analysis that, when interrogated carefully, reveal the messy and contingent nature of emancipation. Ultimately, Reidy demonstrates that emancipation was a process—a contested process—that advanced at different speeds across the slaveholding states.

Reidy begins by exploring time and challenging readers to abandon the assumptions built into the linear chronology of the Civil War. (Neither the outcome of the war nor the Thirteenth Amendment was preordained, he reminds us.) Throughout the first section of the volume, Reidy shows that the timeline of emancipation had a certain elasticity to it and that those who lived during the war measured the pace of emancipation according to distinct timetables. Free black northerners, for example, contextualized the edicts and proclamations that facilitated emancipation in terms of transatlantic revolutions, human progress, and the dawn of a new age. Confederate partisans, meanwhile, harkened backward to the American Revolution. At the same time, bondsmen and-women regularly sought freedom according to the cyclical rhythms of the seasons; Union troops in motion during spring and summer campaigns provided opportunities for escape that winter months typically did not. These competing timetables, along with the temporal dislocations, caused the trauma of war itself and created a climate in which time seemed to move at unpredictable and inconsistent speeds. Emancipation, meanwhile, occurred “in a series of incremental movements, backward as well as forward, some more fleeting than others” (20).

Reidy finds the same plasticity with respect to space. Troops on the march invariably left an imprint on the natural and built environment. And locations could be Confederate territory one day and occupied by Union troops the next. A field that had once been a site of backbreaking labor and violent punishment, for example, could be transformed into a bloody battlefield or a Union campground. The malleability of wartime spaces opened up new possibilities for bondsmen and-women in search of liberty. As Union forces encroached on Confederate-controlled territory, “both the blue-clad soldiers and the ground they occupied became interchangeably identified with freedom” in the minds of the enslaved women and men who headed for the Union lines in droves (127). This spatial instability, Reidy argues, gave the natural and built landscape of the slaveholding states multiple meanings with ever-shifting significance. These shifting geographies, in turn, affected the timing and possibility of emancipation for the enslaved.

Finally, Reidy demonstrates that “home,” too, could mean many things at once. Home, whether a family dwelling, a neighborhood, or larger state or national imagined community, conjured up emotional responses such as love, loyalty, and nostalgia, attitudes that may or may not have been shared by others. Slaveholding Confederates, for example, fought for a regional as well as patriarchal ideal of home and family that included their right to own human property. Enslaved men and women, meanwhile, maintained very different interpretations of ideal...