Illusions of emancipation : the pursuit of freedom and equality in the twilight of slavery /

Many distinguished historians, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles H. Wesley, James M. McPherson, Ira Berlin, and Eric Foner, have pondered this historical question: "Who freed the slaves?" For the last four decades, scholars generally have emphasized the role and agency of the South's four million enslaved people in what they term the "self-emancipation process." Others, though mindful of the determined efforts of slaves to free themselves, have credited President Abraham Lincoln with moving slowly but linearly toward emancipation as a strategic measure to overturn the Confederate rebellion. Reidy (Howard Univ.) here frames emancipation instead as a series of fitful "bursts," integrating into the familiar story of emancipation concepts of time, space ("microenvironments"), and home. He interprets wartime emancipation as an uneven and open-ended process--neither direct nor smooth--rather than a series of linear events. Reidy peers into the lives of enslaved people during emancipation, paying special attention to their experiences under Confederate authority (in April 1865, 2.6 million slaves still resided within rebel territory). He underscores how "the land of freedom, like freedom itself, possessed the property of motion," a leitmotif that might have been developed more fully in this otherwise excellent book. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. --John David Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Reidy (From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South) draws on the massive set of documents related to emancipation, black soldiering, Reconstruction, and related issues in the National Archives to bring us into the intimate worlds of people working out the meanings of "freedom" during the Civil War era. The author's insightful study of the many complex, contradictory, and contentious ideas about and engagements with fighting for or against black freedom shows that experience counted more than ideology, practice more than promise, in determining the scope and scale of equality. By his reckoning, blacks drove and thus in critical ways defined the issues through such actions as throwing off bondage, fighting for the Union, creating their own institutions, and working to gain property. One conclusion that comes from Reidy's telling and compelling accounts is the persistence black Americans used to claim and stake out freedom, however incomplete, on their terms. VERDICT Reidy's important book shows that the movement toward freedom was neither linear nor inevitable but was and must be constant. In that, he speaks to not only history but our own day.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.