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10 - Emancipation and War
- from Part II - Social Experience
- Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Louisiana State University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of the American Civil War
- Published online:
- 11 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2019, pp 194-219
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- Chapter
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Summary
Emancipation is the Civil War’s hallmark achievement and most enduring legacy. In many ways, it is the conflict’s distinguishing mark, the silver lining that elevates it from another pointless bloodbath to a just war. Yet while it was taking place, the destruction of Southern slavery was a long-winded, haphazard process, fraught with inconsistencies and suffused with tragedy. At any given moment and at any given place, the fate of emancipation rested on a combination of factors: the particular configuration of slavery in the area, the geographical lay of the land, the balance of power between Union and Confederate forces, the policies of both governments, the individual attitudes of local commanders, and the ability of enslaved people to seize opportunity from these shifting circumstances. On the ground, the war never was a steady march towards freedom, and the collapse of the slave system was marked by great variation across time and space. In some locales, it was quick and sudden, marked by wholesale departures of the enslaved population or by spurts of violence against masters and their property. In others, slavery died a slow and gradual death, with acts of resistance so subtle they were barely visible to the naked eye.
1 - Bodies in Motion and the Making of Emancipation
- from I - CLAIMING EMANCIPATION
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- By Yael A. Sternhell, Tel Aviv University
- Edited by William A. Link, University of Florida, James J. Broomall, Shepherd University, West Virginia
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- Book:
- Rethinking American Emancipation
- Published online:
- 05 November 2015
- Print publication:
- 12 November 2015, pp 15-41
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- Chapter
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Summary
Emancipation figures in our imagination as an event of mythic proportions, a sea change splitting American history into two. Yet for enslaved Southerners, emancipation was first and foremost a complex lived experience, a daily reality that took multiple, shifting, and often contradictory forms. Slavery, a system encompassing millions of people, fell apart in thousands of different ways.
Over the last few decades, historians have been able to reconstruct the general contours of the emancipatory process. We now know that the destruction of slavery was slow and uneven, generally following the path of the Union Army's haphazard progress in conquering the South. We know that some slaves leaped at the sight of the first Union soldier, while others exercised extreme caution and stayed on the plantation for months or years after freedom became a fact. We know that certain bondspeople found new opportunities for work, education, and family life soon after ridding themselves of their masters, while others suffered, sickened, and died trying to build new lives.
Perhaps most acutely, we are now aware of the many different ways in which slaves actively took part in bringing about their own liberation. On the plantation, enslaved men and women used the circumstances of wartime to reshape discipline even while their legal status remained the same. They worked less, stole more, pushed back against physical punishment and stood up to masters and mistresses who no longer seemed omnipotent. Slaves whose owners had fled in the face of the enemy burned down the Big House or emptied it of valuables, while others enthusiastically served as informers, spies, and scouts for the Union Army. The destruction of slavery did not happen on a particular day or as a result of a particular act. It materialized across time and space, through countless manifestations of resistance and sabotage, some invisible, some in full view.
Within their arsenal of weapons, flight from bondage was the most potent means for slaves to fundamentally transform their own condition as human chattel while at the same time undermine the slave society as a whole. Emancipation happened first and foremost on Southern roads, where hundreds of thousands of African Americans undertook acts of individual self-liberation through the independent movement of their bounded limbs.