Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 17: Slaves fighting for freedom

Abraham Lincoln, still the Great Emancipator?

The New York Review of Books runs a lot of essays on the Civil War. Usually they are in the form of book reviews. But that publications reviews normally use the books under consideration to form analytical essays they may go well beyond commenting on the books themselves.

James McPherson, an historian who has a major role in popularizing serious, reality-based history of the Civil War and related topics, has a number of NY Review pieces. Including a recent one, They Chose Freedom 03/20/08 issue, reviewing A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation by David W. Blight (link is behind subscription).

McPherson discusses two major themes in the history of the end of slavery. One is the action of the slaves themselves in seeking freedom and forcing the issue onto the top of the national political agenda. The other is the role of the abolitionist movement, and of Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation in particular.

Here's how McPherson frames the issues:

The traditional answer to the question "Who freed the slaves?" was Abraham Lincoln. But many black and other historians have placed greater emphasis on the initiative of the slaves. These slaves saw the Civil War as a potential war for abolition well before Lincoln did. By coming into Union military lines in the South, they forced the issue of emancipation on the Lincoln administration. "While Lincoln continued to hesitate about the legal, constitutional, moral, and military aspects of the matter," wrote the black historian and theologian Vincent Harding in 1981, "the relentless movement of the self-liberated fugitives into the Union lines" soon "approached and surpassed every level of force previously known." Making themselves "an unavoidable military and political issue...this overwhelming human movement...of self-freed men and women...took their freedom into their own hands." The Emancipation Proclamation, when it finally and belatedly came, merely "confirmed and gave ambiguous legal standing to the freedom which black people had already claimed through their own surging, living proclamations."

During the 1980s this self-emancipation thesis became dominant. It won the imprimatur of the foremost scholarly enterprise on the history of emancipation, the Freedmen and Southern Society project at the University of Maryland. By acting "resolutely to place their freedom—and that of their posterity—on the wartime agenda," wrote the editors of this project, the slaves were "the prime movers in securing their own liberty." One of the historians associated with the Freedmen and Southern Society project, Barbara J. Fields, gave wide currency to this theme in her eloquent statements on camera in the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Civil War (viewed by more than forty million people), and in the book that accompanied the series. "Freedom did not come to the slaves from words on paper, either the words of Congress or those of the President," said Fields in 1990, but from "the initiative of the slaves" who "taught the nation that it must place the abolition of slavery at the head of its agenda." A decade later Lerone Bennett Jr. declared that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was a hoax. He "did not intend for it to free a single Negro.... Lincoln didn't make emancipation; emancipation, which he never understood or supported or approved, made Lincoln."

One of the problems that writers and historians face in dealing with an issue as much studied as the American Civil War is that so much has been researched and written about, how do you come up with a fresh perspective? Academics, especially early in their careers, are under pressure to demonstrate that they've done original research that will get them published and earn reviews that say their work has "made a significant contribution" to their subject field.

That's part of the reason you get oddball arguments like the one that Lincoln "did not intend for [the Emancipation Proclamation] to free a single Negro.... Lincoln didn't make emancipation; emancipation, which he never understood or supported or approved, made Lincoln."

In fact, arguments like that are favorites of neo-Confederate pseudohistory. The neo-Confederate versions would run something like this: "The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. The North didn't want to free the slaves. It wasn't even their official policy until the middle of the war. Lincoln himself didn't even intend for the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves. It was originally supposed to be a hoax. So slavery had nothing to do with the war."

McPherson's explanation seems fairly obvious, that both the slaves' action for self-emancipation and the actions of the federal government played their parts. Given the conditions of slavery and the South's extreme fears of "servile insurrection", it's only speculation as to whether a massive slave uprising could have been achieved or as to how long that would have taken to develop.

As McPherson relates:

The Emancipation Proclamation officially made Union soldiers into an army of liberation. Northern troops carried copies of the Proclamation and distributed thousands of them as they penetrated into the heartland of the Confederacy. By the war's last year, more than 10 percent of these soldiers of freedom were black, most of them former slaves. That army was chiefly responsible for the freedom of slaves who came within its purview. By the end of the war, David Blight estimates, "some 600,000 to 700,000 out of the nearly four million African American slaves had reached some form of emancipation" by this process. But most of them had done so by the Union army coming to them rather than by them escaping to the Union army. The remaining 3.3 million slaves achieved freedom by the Thirteenth Amendment, whose adoption was possible only through Union military victory. And no one deserved more credit for that victory than Abraham Lincoln, commander in chief of an army of liberation.

McPherson notes that in the two slave narratives under review, both men escaped to Federal lines during the war itself. And both of them reported being well received by the white Union soldiers:

The welcome that Turnage and Washington received from Union soldiers challenges - or at least qualifies - the accounts by many historians that emphasize the racism and anti-black hostility of most soldiers. Both men have nothing but good words to say about their experiences after they reached Union lines. If they had been writing for a public (and predominantly white) readership, of course, we would be properly skeptical of such statements. But they were writing for themselves and their families and we may infer that they were writing what they actually felt. There were many racist Union soldiers, to be sure. And the light color of both Washington and Turnage probably worked in their favor. Washington was so light that the Union soldiers he first encountered thought he was a white man and were astonished to learn that he had been a slave. His reception, and Turnage's, might have been considerably less friendly if they had been really black.

Reality-based history, there's a lot to be said for it.

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, james mcpherson, us civil war