Epilogue

The defeat of the Confederacy destroyed slavery and the slaveholders' quest for an independent nation. The Freedmen's Bureau, established by Congress weeks before the surrender, aimed to construct a system of compensated labor on the ruins of slavery and to identify and protect the rights that freed people needed to function in the new world of freedom. They encountered strong opposition from former slaveholders, which President Andrew Johnson's lenient reconstruction policy appeared to encourage. When Radical Republicans gained the upper hand, they enacted sweeping legislation designed to reconstruct the seceded states on the principle of racial democracy (the Reconstruction Acts) and to safeguard black Americans' civil and political rights (a Civil Rights Act and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments). But by failing to legislate a redistribution of Southern land, the Radicals squelched the freed people's most cherished hope for economic advancement. Although this and other setbacks-including the violent overthrow of Radical Reconstruction in 1876-dampened hopes, the quest for freedom and equality endured.

Confines

Confined space offers an instructive vantage point into the reconfiguration of social relationships that were central to the emancipation process. In homes and kitchens throughout the slave states, enslaved house servants devised strategies for asserting greater control over their labor and their lives, even when escape to freedom was out of reach. Women and men hired to work in the shops and factories that supported the Confederate war effort interacted with new casts of characters with new possibilities for stretching their customary boundaries and shedding their usual constraints. For freedom-seeking refugees who reached Union lines, refugee camps (generally called "contraband camps") offered shelter and employment, though often under the watchful eyes of proselytizing Northerners. Cities presented special conditions for the breakdown of slavery, as the experience of Washington, D.C., illustrates. The D.C. emancipation act of April 1862 set in motion a contested process that defies the simple characterization of immediate emancipation.

Revolutionary Time

Northerners and Southerners alike often viewed the Civil War as a revolution. For Confederates, secession promised a return to the era of the Founders when, they presumed, property rights in humans were secure. Unionists found ambiguity, not certainty, in the term revolution, eventually offsetting their fears of unrestrained violence with the belief that destroying slavery might entail unleashing revolutionary social change. Everyone, North and South, grappled with understanding the peculiarities of revolutionary time: its ability to accelerate, to slow down or stop, and even to move backward. As the end of the war drew near, the thought that the centuries-old institution of slavery had collapsed in little more than four years required suspending conventional wisdom about the passage of time. But for enslaved persons, those years seemed an eternity during which unknown thousands had perished before freedom arrived. Both privately and publicly, observers North and South pondered the fearsome toll that slavery and its violent destruction exacted upon the nation.

Introduction

The book explores the complex ways that slavery ended over the course of the Civil War, focusing particularly on the actions and experiences of black Americans, both enslaved and free in the North as well as the South. It emphasizes the elusive nature of freedom and the many obstacles in its winding path. Time moved erratically, and even space took on unforeseeably new characteristics in the turmoil of war. At bottom, the emancipation struggle involved a contest over the complex relationships that linked individuals to families, neighborhoods, and ultimately the nation, the resolution of which had implications that reached far beyond enslaved people and enslavers. The Union's victory over the Confederacy and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, but its baleful effects have hung like a cloud over succeeding generations right into the twenty-first century.

Tremors and Whirlpools

In times of war, physical space may appear to shed its customary character of permanence and become pliable. Places that in times of peace signify safety and security might during war become scenes of danger, even death. Federal emancipation policy accentuated this tendency, as civilians and soldiers alike employed space to new ends, often polar opposites of its earlier uses. When freedom-seeking refugees gained the protection of the U.S. Army, they benefited from a cordon of safety that transcended the fixed space of military camps to encompass armies on the move as well as at rest. The winds of change swept through plantation big-houses, fields, and workshops, where enslaved women and men moved more slowly and spoke less respectfully than usual. The bodies of water that lapped on the shores and cut through the interior of the Confederacy proved especially amenable to loosening the bonds of slavery. Nonetheless, black sailors in the U.S. Navy discovered that constraints as well as opportunities accompanied this particular route to freedom.

Panoramas

The war that ended in the destruction of slavery played out across a spatial panorama encompassing hundreds of thousands of square miles and, in the process, set millions of people in motion. Confederate military planners mobilized slaves to reinforce defensive positions and support military operations far from their homes, while skittish slaveholders removed their human property away from prospective danger zones in a practice that quickly came to be called "refugeeing." Freedom-seeking refugees took advantage of opportunities to escape their masters. Civilians no less than soldiers studied geography to learn more than just the place names that dotted news accounts of the war: the natural environment might offer clues into potential avenues or obstacles to freedom. Despite the internal stirring, rebel authorities retained control over much of the land mass of the original Confederacy to the end, and much of what was nominally in Union hands remained contested space. Only after the surrender did enslaved people in such areas begin to experience freedom.

Linear Chronology

Most accounts of wartime emancipation follow a linear chronology from secession through Lee's surrender to the Thirteenth Amendment. Many such narratives also view the nation's history as a progressive unfolding of democracy from colonial times down to the present. Although the evolution of federal emancipation policy may appear to have reached a logical conclusion in the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, such an outcome was far from certain at the outset, given the contingencies of war and the vagaries of public policymaking. Yet African Americans in both the Confederacy and the Union insisted that that the war must result in emancipation and full citizenship. Achieving these goals involved a long and uneven process, one littered with obstacles. As the experience of black soldiers in the U.S. Army illustrated, advocates of freedom and equality persevered, confident that victory was worth any price.

Our Home and Country

Emancipation obliged the nation to absorb into its public culture the persons freed from bondage. This imperative had ethical dimensions as well as economic, legal, and political ones. Black Americans presumed that they would participate actively in the process, but white Americans often viewed them as passive observers or objects of other people's actions. Elected officials and assorted commentators on public affairs posed the question: "what is to be done with the Negroes?" Following promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Secretary of War established the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission to advise the government regarding appropriate national action. Among other things, the commissioners recommended the formation of a bureau of emancipation to help usher the freed people and their former owners into the post-slavery era, and Congress concurred, creating the Freedmen's Bureau in the closing weeks of the war. When ratified in December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and empowered Congress to define what freedom entailed.

Recurring Seasons

The four seasons influenced the collapse of slavery, not least due to the effects of seasonal changes on military operations. In spring 1862, Union forces launched major offensives into the Confederacy. Federal troops destabilized slavery wherever they went, and freedom-seeking refugees approached their positions by the thousands in hopes of receiving protection. Grant's victory at Vicksburg in July 1863 cut the Confederacy in half, and by the following summer, Confederate civilians and soldiers alike were feeling the effects of the Union's "hard war" strategy. The number of freed people within Union lines grew into the hundreds of thousands. Although few major battles occurred in the loyal Border States, the war nonetheless undermined slavery there, largely due to the federal government's decision to recruit enslaved black soldiers without their owners' consent. Border-State slaveholders grew bitter, and the bitterness lasted far longer than a season.

The Home of the Brave

The end of slavery reverberated through the North no less than the South. From the start of the war, black leaders in the free states had hoped to complete the uneven process of gradual emancipation that had been unfolding there since the Revolutionary War. They foresaw an end to the discriminatory laws and practices that compromised their citizenship and denied the elective franchise to most Northern black men. When the War Department began enlisting black soldiers, recruits soon encountered discrimination in the army and began to protest. Meanwhile, their families and other supporters at home leveraged the men's service to challenge all distinctions based on color, notably the practice of segregated streetcars in the cities. Several months before the war ended, black leaders resuscitated the antebellum national convention movement, and black communities across the North and in Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy selected delegates to participate in setting a national agenda for completing the abolition of slavery and extending all the rights of citizenship to black persons, North and South.