Emancipation and Origins of Reconstruction: A Sesquicentennial Reassessment

The sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War and Reconstruction has renewed scholars’ reassessment of emancipation, whether its limits, process, ideological framers, and immediate consequences. Joseph Reidy’s award-winning Illusions of Emancipation and Rebecca Zietlow’s The Forgotten Emancipator are two recent contributions. Both take different approaches. Zietlow employs a biographical lens for exploring an underexamined framer of America’s second founding while Reidy proposes a new interpretative framework. When read together, the respective projects enhance the current field and adds new directions, questions and issues for future projects.

In her concise biography, Zietlow contends that James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio was “on the forefront of the fight for liberty as he developed a vision of rights that included racial equality and economic rights for workers” (3). His role in the emancipation of both African Americans and American laborers is not only worthy of interrogation but offers insights into present day struggles for social justice. As with most biographies, her attempt is noble. Her purpose—the restoration and resurrection of Ashley and his radical vision—is both a strength and weakness of the work. According to Zietlow, “Ashley recognized the interrelationship between race discrimination and economic subordination” (11). She contends Ashley succeeded in providing an abolition and Reconstruction framework with the Amendments and failed with worker rights and enforcement of black rights until the 1960s. By focusing on his ideology, she excavates how Ashley “altered our Constitution and expanded human rights” (12). She firmly embraces the Reconstruction era as a second founding interpretation but extends her analysis beyond Reconstruction constitutional amendments and considers the transformation of labor to a free labor paradigm. Throughout the concise volume, she demonstrates how Ashley “sought to improve all of their lives with a broad free labor agenda” but his good intentions had its limits in remaking the nation (19).

After contextualizing his formative early years, Zietlow explains how childhood exposure to the institutional horrors of slavery and a divided family caused his hatred of slavery, his involvement in the Underground Railroad, and his early failed political campaigns. The political environment in Ohio also shaped Ashley and his anti-slavery views and labor activism. The third chapter proves essential for Zietlow’s development of her argument by contextualizing the free labor origins of Ashley’s later radical emancipation vision. Immigration and the resulting nativism for certain immigrants served as major push factors. Zietlow does acknowledge the tensions between labor and the anti-slavery movement. But her top-down approach tends to obscure the on the ground member realities. Horace Greeley’s arguments of white workers as slaves and wage slavery allowed for Ashley and others to ignore the issue of racial equality and bridge the labor movement with abolition activism. Zietlow concludes by suggesting that the Free Soilers were a labor anti-slavery movement. Here, the author’s blind spot to how class consciousness masks real race issues for the sake of restoring Ashley’s role in the emancipation process is both simplistic and problematic.

As a disillusioned Democrat, Ashley joined the Republican Party. Zietlow astutely characterizes Ashley as a radical who “combined elements of antislavery constitutionalism, free labor ideology, and Jacksonian democracy” (68). He advocated for racial equality and abolition by advancing an “egalitarian free labor vision with roots in the economics of the Democratic Party” (68). Ashley’s issues with the Democratic Party appeared after the increasing party’s acceptance of the pro-slavery wing over his ideas and other anti-slavery ones in the mid-1840s. The post-Fugitive Slave Law realities pushed him out of the party. Moreover, he runs his first political campaign as a Republican in 1856. Throughout this campaign, Zietlow persuasively shows how his speeches...