James Oakes. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865

Abstract

For decades historians have discussed the process and agents of emancipation in America. Interest in the topic remains strong among both academics and the public as the nation observes the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment. The end of slavery in America, and the war that accomplished it, have over the years been viewed in a variety of ways. Lincoln has been depicted as the Great Emancipator or as a reluctant emancipator. The war has been represented as a crusade against slavery or as a struggle purely for the preservation of the Union, even at times as a disreputable ploy to achieve northern commercial supremacy. In more recent years, some historians have argued that the war was morally indefensible and its outcome not worth the cost in lives. James Oakes synthesizes the best of previous interpretations and offers a new framework for understanding how the institution of slavery came to an end in the United States. Freedom National, winner of the 2013 Abraham Lincoln Prize, takes its title from the concept of prewar anti-slavery activists who argued that slavery was an anomaly within American law, created by local enactment, and tolerated by the Constitution only within those states that maintained it. Freedom, by contrast, was national, the normal condition of all persons under United States law and under the law of nations, both in the federal territories and on the high seas. For antebellum opponents of slavery, this idea was both the philosophical basis of the national anti-slavery policies they advocated and a program for the eventual abolition of slavery, not only in the territories but also within the states where it was at that time protected by positive law. Early anti-slavery stalwarts such as Salmon P. Chase and Charles Sumner expressed the concept as “Freedom National, Slavery Sectional.” This idea became the roadmap for the Republican Party throughout the Civil War, in what Oakes shows to be a remarkably steady and unanimous march toward the final destruction of slavery.