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Title: Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American South

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2011

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Abstract: Emancipation in the United States was vast, distended, and chaotic. Shifting boundaries surrounded the struggle, unfolding unevenly over years and an expanse the size of Continental Europe. Some enslaved people were able to escape to Union lines within months of the beginning of the war, yet millions remained firmly bound by slavery in 1865. The president, legislatures, judges, and generals played crucial roles in ending slavery, as did enslaved people, who seized freedom at every opportunity. Military and political struggle were inextricably interwoven with the struggles of individuals held in slavery; thus Abraham Lincoln kept a map of the distribution of slaverythe first map of its kind in the United Statesclose at hand.Trying to make sense of this complexity, historians of emancipation have tended to focus on agency, on the ways actors in different spheres and places strove for freedom. In its simplest form, that inquiry has turned around the question of who freed the slaves. Thanks to innovative work since the 1980s, we now see that freedom came as a result of many strugglesin cataclysmic battles and in protracted debates, on farms and in bureaucracies, in political parties and on lonely roads. Freedom demanded action on many fronts because slavery was entrenched throughout American society. A full understanding of emancipation requires that we put the pieces together. To do thatto comprehend the patterns, proportions, and timing of emancipation, to see multiple forms of power in interaction in space and timewe need an analytical framework that is inclusive, self-aware, and disciplined...

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Authors: Nesbit, Scott; Ayers, Edward L.

Periodical (Full): Journal of the Civil Warr Era

Issue: 1

Volume: 1

Pages: 3-24

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Other, Race and Ethnicity

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