Twilight Of Slavery Research Articles

:Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery

:<i>Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery</i>

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

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...

Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery

Joseph P. Reidy, in Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery, argues for viewing the process of emancipation as complex, uneven, and far reaching. Centering the testimony of formerly enslaved people and their understanding of wartime emancipation, Reidy demonstrates that the end of slavery in the United States took a winding, troubled, and uncertain path.

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

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

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

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

Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery

Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation ed. by David Blight and Jim Downs, and: Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps by Amy Murrell Taylor, and: Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph P. Reidy

Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation ed. by David Blight and Jim Downs, and: Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps by Amy Murrell Taylor, and: Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph P. Reidy

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

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...

Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

"Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman." Canadian Journal of History, 52(3), pp. 613–614

Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping by Lucy Maddox

Reviewed by: The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping by Lucy Maddox Rodney J. Steward The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping. Lucy Maddox. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-43991-1318-5, 256 pp., cloth, $28.50 The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping by Lucy Maddox recounts the events surrounding the 1851 kidnappings of Sisters Elizabeth and Rachel Parker, who were both free-born black natives of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Lying only seven miles from the state's border with Maryland, this rural part of southeastern Pennsylvania was the midcentury epicenter of conflict between the competing interests of North and South regarding the institution of slavery. The context and catalyst for this story is the passage of the Federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which had profound consequences for the residents of Chester County and for the nation as well. Elizabeth and Rachel Parker lived in the predominantly white farming community of Chester County. Quakers originally settled the area, and, though morally opposed to slavery, they were not abolitionists. An African American population consisting of both free blacks and fugitive slaves also resided in the area. Both girls lived with white families, exchanging domestic work for room and board. Emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Law, slavecatchers from Maryland preyed upon the black population. Making no distinction between fugitives and the free born, they profited by kidnapping blacks and selling them to slave brokers in Baltimore. Tom McCreary of nearby Elkton, Maryland, was the boldest of all slavecatchers in the neighborhood. He spotted potential victims in Pennsylvania while delivering mail during the day, and, according to Maddox, he also had connections to a local criminal organization [End Page 212] that aided in the capture of his victims. Elizabeth Parker was his first victim. In December 1851, she was abducted at night in the farmyard of Matthew Donnelly, the man for whom she worked. Two months later, she arrived at a slave pen in New Orleans, where she was sold to a local woman. Two weeks later, McCreary boldly snatched Rachel Parker in broad daylight from the house of Joseph Miller. She was spirited away to a Baltimore slave pen, where she would remain for more than a year. Although the residents of Chester and surrounding counties loathed abolitionists, they were utterly contemptuous of slavecatchers, and they quickly swung into action. With the aid of several prominent Quakers in Baltimore and supporters in Pennsylvania, locals raised funds to locate and rescue the girls. In New Orleans, Elizabeth, who had come to rather like her new life and identity, was arrested for breaking curfew. While in the custody of New Orleans police, she revealed that she had been kidnapped in Pennsylvania and that she was a free-born resident of Chester County. She was soon returned to Baltimore, where her rescuers were busy filing suit for both girls' release. Elizabeth returned to Pennsylvania in a matter of months, but Rachel's case dragged on for more than a year. Meanwhile, the sisters' case became a national story, threatening to kill the fragile compromise of 1850. The chief fault with Maddox's book is the overly complicated and meandering nature of the narrative. The reader is given too much information and often loses sight of exactly what the story is trying to convey. That said, Maddox has pulled together a remarkable and fascinating story that addresses the monumental issue of slavery in the midcentury United States at the local, regional, and national levels. She adds layer upon layer of complexity to our understanding of the national attitude toward slavery, abolition, and the economic motives underpinning support for both. She also offers insightful commentary on the everyday lives of free black women and how for some, like Elizabeth Parker, slavery held out the promise of stability and certainty. The book is sure to spark fruitful conversation in undergraduate and graduate classes seeking to tackle the myriad problems that threatened to shatter the fragile Compromise of 1850. Masterfully researched and powerfully written, Lucy Maddox's The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping makes a valuable and scholarly contribution to the literature on the twilight of slavery and should be on the reading list of every scholar...

Adam Rothman.Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery.

Adam Rothman.<i>Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery</i>.

Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery

Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery

Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman

Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery

Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery