The Feel of Freedom: Stories of Emancipation and State-Making in the Civil War Era

Abstract

The Feel of Freedom:Stories of Emancipation and State-Making in the Civil War Era Gregory P. Downs (bio) Joseph P. Reidy, Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 506 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xv +349 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Every book is a commodity, but good history can't quite be consumed. Good history is stubbornly indigestible, an irritant in the excretory system of agents and publicists and TED Talk bookers that churn out high-quality junk food that passes sometimes for history but then passes from us without leaving a trace. Good history nourishes the field, sends us off to write more, in extension and at times also in irritation. It is a joy and a relief to say that these two works cannot quite be consumed. Which is also a way of saying they cannot be easily digested, that they deserve our critique. These two books ask us to re-examine the daily, subjective experience of Civil War Era emancipation. The books therefore challenge our understanding of the Civil War and the end of slavery, the interaction of subjective experience and retrospective history, and the meaning of the venerable and perhaps overburdened concept of freedom in United States history. They should lead the field to wrestle openly with the important, under-analyzed relationship between policy and implementation, between state development and emancipation. And they should lead us to ask whether we can narrate emancipation without emphasizing the post-April 1865 months when most emancipations occurred. Separately and also collectively we will have to grow vaster and contain more multitudes in response to them. The four million people held in bondage in 1860 traveled many paths to emancipation over the following years. Some headed north; others tried to take control of their surroundings; millions stayed in place, tied by health or family to locations that seemed far from freedom. In a sweeping account, Reidy [End Page 589] narrates as many of these stories as possible, following freedom-seeking people to the North, to the Army, to the swamps, and almost everywhere in between. Taylor focuses upon the tens of thousands of former slaves who moved to roughly 300 contraband camps as battles raged across the Confederacy. There they worked as laborers and nurses and eventually soldiers, establishing homes and neighborhoods in the shadow of U.S. Army encampments, building improvised schools and churches and working with missionaries and volunteers and some military personnel to stave off famine and disease. We write in a moment when historians gesture to the agency of the disem-powered but emphasize the limitations these people struggled under. These works and Chandra Manning's related, and excellent, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (2016) follow their invocations of agency with far more detailed explorations of the limits of freedpeople's power once inside U.S. Army lines. Taylor classifies these freedpeople as "refugees," a group defined in large part by their "liminal status and their compelling need for protection" (p. 10). What happened between the May 23, 1861 arrival of enslaved people at Fort Monroe and the December 6, 1865 ratification of the 13th Amendment (and the amendment's emancipation of enslaved Kentuckians) is as well known as almost any sequence in U.S. history. Three men (and, Taylor suggestively argues, some unnamed women) rowed to the U.S. fort at Hampton Bays in May 1861 and presented themselves to the freshly arrived U.S. Army commander, Major General Benjamin Butler. Shortly thereafter a Virginia slaveowner demanded their return under the Fugitive Slave Act. When Butler refused, dozens and then hundreds of formerly enslaved people fled to Fort Monroe and the colony established at nearby Hampton, Virginia. Meanwhile Butler's missives to Washington and the flight of slaves to other Army bases prodded policymakers to address the status of the formerly enslaved people. What followed was the First Confiscation Act, a range of military...