The Trouble with Freedom

Abstract

The Trouble with Freedom W. Caleb McDaniel (bio) David W. Blight and Jim Downs, eds. Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 208 pp. Notes and index. Paper, $24.95. Hendrik Hartog. The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 208 pp. Notes and index. Cloth, $27.95. In 1982, when the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) began to publish the results of its research in the National Archives, the Project's editors forecast that the multivolume publication would eventually include five series. To date, six volumes in three series have appeared, though much about the project has changed, including the editors, the titles of some series, and the press that is now releasing the door-stopping volumes. Yet two constants remain: the subtitle of this multivolume project is still A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, and the title of the anthology as a whole is still one word, Freedom.1 The contributors to Beyond Freedom are unsettled by that one-word title and seek, in turn, to unsettle the history of emancipation. On the one hand, this volume's editors acknowledge the debt that all historians of emancipation owe to Freedom. The book is dedicated to "all the past and present editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project," and three of its contributors belong to that group (p. v). Still, in the twenty-five years that passed between the first volume of Freedom and the appearance of Beyond Freedom, the very documents uncovered by the FSSP have encouraged many scholars to reassess freedom's utility as an over-arching paradigm. This collection joins monographs such as Steve Kantrowitz's More Than Freedom (2012) or Jim Downs's Sick from Freedom (2012) and review essays such as Carole Emberton's "Unwriting the Freedom Narrative" (2016) in marking a historiographical moment: whereas Freedom once seemed an appropriate big-tent term for the history of emancipation from 1861 to 1867, it is now (to borrow from another title in this growing historiography) a troubled refuge.2 [End Page 209] What most troubles the contributors to Beyond Freedom is an idea that their collective scholarship, along with the work of historians not included between these covers, has already done a great deal to unsettle. Emancipation, write the editors, is no longer seen as a "shotgun moment of liberation," but as "a process" (p. 4). And historical actors did not always experience the transition from slavery to freedom as a sharp break, for at least two reasons.3 The first reason can be seen by looking retrospectively at slavery from the vantage point of emancipation, a perspective that discloses a world of enslaved people's politics and thinking about freedom long before legal emancipation occurred. As Susan O'Donovan shows in her contribution to Beyond Freedom, the mobility often required by their labor "allowed slaves to try on new identities, sample new cultures, and experience what it meant to be a masterless man (or woman), if only for a moment" (p. 31). According to O'Donovan, mobility also encouraged enslaved men and women to imagine "different possibilities, different publics, and different futures" that fueled a collective political vision already fully formed when freedom came. Paradoxically, the sorts of documents uncovered by the FSSP show that slavery had served as a "training ground for black freedom" (pp. 27, 33). On the other hand, the archival record also reveals many survivals of slavery—its violence, coercion, and racist underpinnings—in the era of black freedom. As O'Donovan writes in another context, "the end of the Civil War must not be confused with the end of slavery."4 Likewise, what Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan later called the badges and incidents of slavery survived long after slavery was legally destroyed by the Thirteenth Amendment (a consummation that, as James Oakes argues in his contribution to Beyond Freedom, abolitionists and Republicans had long devoutly wished and worked for). As the process of slavery's destruction unfolded, it brought in its train violence, displacement, death, and new forms of coercion. If, as O'Donovan...