The Struggle for Black Freedom before Emancipation

Abstract

Civil has recently become a hot ticket. movie Glory, the PBS series The Civil War by Ken Burns, and James McPherson's recent Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the conflict have all dramatized the continuing relevance of the war as a defining experience for a people and a nation. These stories, however, have often neglected an important part of that defining experience: the role of black peo ple in securing their own emancipation. Most accounts of war date emancipa tion from Lincoln's famous procla^^^ mation and the military campaigns that followed. Even Glory, which traces the heroic deeds of black soldiers from Massachusetts, portrays slaves in the lowcountry of South Carolina as incompetent and ineffectual, persons who simply waited for Northern free black liberators to march South and rescue them from bondage. However, even this relatively en lightened view of the role of black people in their own emancipation is historically inaccurate. As Ira Berlin and his colleagues have shown in their monumental multi-volume series, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, slaves throughout the South squeezed free dom in dribs and drabs from their own local