Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 28: Emancipation in the US and abroad

Peter Kolchin in "Reexamining Southern Emancipation in Comparative Perspective" (Journal of Southern History 81:1 Feb 2015) attempts to position the significance of the emancipation of the American slaves in the context of other modern emancipations, from both serfdom and chattel slavery. As Kolchin notes in his article, such comparative approaches are in fashion at the moment in Southern history.

He argues that "in much of the Western world":

Until the second half of the eighteenth century, slavery had seemed an unremarkable feature of life, one consistent-as David Brion Davis has shown-with religion, morality, and progress. There was some sentiment that Christians should not enslave other Christians and Muslims should not enslave other Muslims-that is, in the language of the time, slavery was fit only for "infidels"-but there was little sense that slavery in general was wrong or undesirable.

But then with the progress of democratic and republican ideas and revolutionary movements both in the Old World and the New:

Then, beginning in the years leading up to the major Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, "enlightened" opinion increasingly came to see slavery as problematic. There were different versions of this sentiment: some saw slavery as morally wrong, whereas others argued that it was a backward institution, harmful to society and to economic development. But in an era that increasingly celebrated liberty and equality, slavery and its close twin serfdom, institutions that had for centuries been taken for granted, became objects of intense scrutiny; and over a period of a little more than a century they were abolished throughout the West-bthat is, Europe and European-derived societies in the Americas.

But the Enlightenment was a contradictory phenomenon, which also in some of its manifestations defined aboriginal peoples as "natural" and therefore outside of the civilized world of Reason. Even a major Enlightenment figure like Thomas Jefferson had difficulty imagining that people of African descent could be fully as intelligence and civilized as those of white European descent.

But he is right about how serfdom and slavery came apart with the flowering of capitalist modernism. And he provides this useful timetable about the emancipations in various countries:

Europeans weren't entirely wrong for criticizing or mocking the United States for the genuine contrast between the democratic principles of the government of the white majority and the reality of chattel slavery as a key institution in the American empire of freedom.

Citing the work of James Oakes, he winds up stressing the emancipatory impulse among the Republicans during the Civil War:

... many Republicans saw the war, from its very beginning, as a golden opportunity to move beyond the constitutional limitations that in normal times - that is, in peacetime-prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed. Especially important in this regard was the second Confiscation Act, which authorized the seizure and liberation of all slaves owned by rebels. Union army officers pursued varying policies toward African Americans who came under their control, but increasingly they experimented with various forms of free or, in some cases, semi-free labor, on the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in New Orleans many Republicans saw the war, from its very beginning, as a golden opportunity to move beyond the constitutional limitations that in normal times - that is, in peacetime-prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed. Especially important in this regard was the second Confiscation Act, which authorized the seizure and liberation of all slaves owned by rebels. Union army officers pursued varying policies toward African Americans who came under their control, but increasingly they experimented with various forms of free or, in some cases, semi-free labor, on the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in New Orleans and throughout the lower Mississippi Valley, in northem Virginia, and elsewhere as Confederate territory continued to shrink.

It's part of the neo-Confederate canard that the Civil War was not about slavery to emphasize the limitations of Northern goals when it came to abolishing slavery.

But of course the Southern secessionists were explicit about the reason they were seceding from the Union: to preserve slavery. And while Union war aims were not explicitly directed at abolishing slavery, the North understood that it was necessary to contain slavery and the violent rebellion the slaveowners had ginned up.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that meant in the common terminology of the time that the war for the North had changed from a conventional war, aimed at defeating the opponent, to a revolutionary war aimed at overthrowing the social system of the enemy. And the developments described by Kolchin show that process in its rabid development once the war was under way.