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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph P. Reidy Derryn E. Moten Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. By Joseph P. Reidy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 520 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-4836-1. Perhaps no act or achievement of President Abraham Lincoln endeared Black people to him more than the Emancipation Proclamation, signed on January 1, 1863. Legions of American school-children grew up having teachers tell them that “Lincoln freed the slaves.” Those bold assertions were technically incorrect. The Emancipation Proclamation decreed the liberation of enslaved persons in states in open hostilities in a war between the states of the United States. These states seceded following Lincoln’s election, with South Carolina in the vanguard. The Emancipation Proclamation was a Civil War military measure in that it declared free the South’s most valued asset—bondmen and bondwomen. The backbone of the Southern economy, enslaved Blacks represented a net value in the billions of dollars. “On the plantations,” noted historian Benjamin Quarles, “the slave was ‘the stomach of the Confederacy’” [The Negro in the Making of America, 3rd ed. (New York, NY, 1987), 140]. And Montgomery, Alabama, was the birthplace of the Confederate States of America. This is the context for Joseph Reidy’s Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. Plenty of historians before Reidy claimed that “emancipation” in the Emancipation Proclamation was more fiction than fact. Reidy painstakingly details the numerous ways in which emancipation was an illusion. He quotes abolitionist Charles Wesley, who recalled, “No one can tell the day, the month or the month of the year, upon which slavery was abolished in the United States” (5). For all African Americans, free and unfree, freedom in the Confederate States of America, like freedom above the Mason-Dixon Line, was a partial freedom, a freedom by degrees, an incomplete freedom. This is the strength of Illusions of Emancipation. [End Page 179] The 3.5 million enslaved Blacks in what became the Confederacy represented eighty percent of all enslaved persons in the South. As Reidy opines, “No longer simply pawns to be moved about the chess-board of war, black people were emerging as active participants in the strategy to save the Union by destroying slavery” (42). The Emancipation Proclamation signaled a sea change in Lincoln’s war strategy. No longer a war to preserve the Union, blue and gray soldiers alike construed the Civil War as a war to destroy slavery. The unanswered question for Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln was whether white Union soldiers would resolve themselves to fight, bleed, and possibly die to eradicate Black slavery. Many white men violently refuted the Military Draft Act of 1863 precipitating the New York Draft Riot, a nearly week-long bloodletting that targeted Blacks as the locus of white wrath. For the Confederate government, on the other hand, the efficacy of slavery was moot; the Confederate Constitution held that “the institution of negro [sic] slavery. . .shall be recognized and protected by Congress...” Contrary to the of the ambiguity of the U.S. Constitution, referring to slaves as “such Persons [sic],” the Confederate States Constitution was unambiguous. President Lincoln was correct; a divided house could not stand. President Thomas Jefferson was also correct when he surmised that God is just, and his justice would not slumber forever. The United States began as a nation under the principles that “all men are created equal” and that liberty—freedom—is an “inalienable right.” Confederate President Jefferson Davis believed the converse. So too did his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who argued, “Our new government[’s] . . . foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” The Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments resolved the question of slavery as an institution and status of enslaved persons as a social class in the United States. What these acts left unresolved is...