The Long Emancipation

The Demise of Slavery in the United States

Ira Berlin

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674495487
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Esclavitud

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery's demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women."Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States… The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today's Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change."
—Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review

1

The Near-Century-Long Demise of Slavery

THE SEASON OF emancipation is upon us. The sesquicentennials of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment have prompted much discussion about the arrival of universal freedom in the United States. Yet, while both events are well worthy of commemoration, they might also be occasions to reconsider the single-minded focus on the wartime destruction of slavery, whether in print, on the small screen, or on the big screen—most powerfully in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.¹ Slavery’s demise might better be understood as a near-century-long process in the United States, entwined with an even longer transatlantic struggle, rather than the work of a moment, even if that moment was a great civil war. To put this another way, emancipation began long before January 1, 1863, and of course continued after it.

Slavery in the United States came apart in pieces. Despite every effort of slaveholders and their allies to make the system of chattel bondage airtight by denying black people access to freedom, slavery proved a leaky vessel. Enslaved black men and women wanted out of bondage, and they found numerous exits prior to the Civil War, with its special Articles of War, Confiscation Acts, congressional legislation, presidential edicts, and the definitive constitutional amendment.

To begin, some Africans arrived in North America prior to the advent of chattel bondage and eluded the snare of enslavement. They and their descendants shared freedom, however imperfect, with other Americans.² Among the enslaved, numerous black men and women gained their freedom by successful flight, self-purchase, freedom suits, state-sponsored emancipations, or liberation by individual owners. Prior to the Civil War, the largest group of enslaved African Americans exited slavery in the decades following the American Revolution through a glacially slow process known as “post-nati emancipation,” whereby the children born to enslaved women would be free after a specified date (post nati is Latin for “born after”).³ At the same time, Revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality encouraged states of the upper South to expand access to freedom by loosening the regulations governing manumission and freedom suits.⁴

At the end of the eighteenth century, a counterrevolution challenged and, in some places, reversed these open policies that allowed black people access to freedom, constraining the liberty of black free people.⁵ But when the opportunity arose, black people were quick to claim it. A second war with Britain, beginning in 1812, allowed another 5,000 to find their way to freedom.⁶ And in the years that followed, black people continued to slip their shackles, so that by the middle years of the nineteenth century the slave South was leaking like a sieve. Slaves fled northward to the free states and Canada; southward to Mexico, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean; and at various times across the Atlantic. Not a few slaves emancipated themselves by finding refuge in maroon colonies in Florida, Louisiana, Virginia, and elsewhere within the South, and others found safety on the open sea.⁷ Their numbers are hard to gauge. The best recent estimate is that slaves escaped at a rate of 1,000 to 5,000 per year between 1830 and 1860.⁸ By 1860, the numerous and diverse exits from slavery had produced a “visible” free black population totaling more than half a million in the United States.⁹

After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the leaks increased exponentially as slaves fled in droves, mostly to Union lines. With expanding opportunities to escape, few waited for the proclamation of January 1, 1863, and neither did Lincoln’s administration. The federal government had been freeing slaves for more than a year prior to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and it would free more thereafter.¹⁰

On their own, the leaks did not destroy slavery. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the nearly four million enslaved African Americans had made the United States the largest slave society in the world. But neither were the leaks a minor irritant that could be dismissed as a part of the slaveholders’ cost of doing business. Instead, they were a pervasive disturbance that infuriated the masters precisely because they threatened both the material and ideological foundation upon which the slave regime rested. They shook the slaveowners’ carefully constructed defense of chattel bondage, affirming the antislavery argument in both North and South.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the seepage had grown, as slaves left the South—particularly the border South—by every imaginable conveyance. They traveled by foot, coach, rail, and boat. Some were mailed in boxes; men disguised themselves as women, and women as men. They fled on their own or en masse, aided by friends and relatives or sometimes by agents of the Underground Railroad.¹¹ The outflow unnerved slaveholders, who lost not only valuable property but also their confidence in slave loyalty. The resulting instability dissolved the masters’ paternalist fictions, along with their beliefs about the social order that had once seemed natural and unquestioned. For their part, black people became more certain that they could free themselves and create a slaveless world.

Still, Americans have tended to view these liberations as separate and distinct from the grand finale of freedom’s arrival, the massive Civil War that drove a stake through the heart of chattel bondage. In producing the iconic documents of emancipation and the equally iconic figure of the Great Emancipator, the Civil War remains—in the minds of most people—the singular site of American freedom.

A war that killed three-quarters of a million soldiers and sailors, destroyed billions of dollars’ worth of property, and martyred a beloved president provided reason enough to consecrate it as the site of slavery’s destruction. The statues, memorial parks, holidays, and other totems of national memory confirm the popular embrace of the wartime emancipation narrative. Even those who recognize—and celebrate—the other sites of black liberty acknowledge the singularity of the Civil War. While wars in general, at least in the American context, have served as solvents of slavery, the emancipatory effects of the Civil War stand apart from those of earlier conflicts. Thus, historians see the antebellum upsurge of slave flight—often aided by increasingly politicized free black communities—and the growth of an organized movement against slavery as a prologue to the final act, not as the play itself. The notion that emancipation was a product of the Civil War is so tightly woven into the fabric of American history that it is hard to imagine the cloth might be cut differently.

UNDERSTANDING the destruction of slavery in the United States not as a single climactic event but as a long process that stretched across a near-century provides a useful and perhaps fuller appreciation of the reality of emancipation. Freedom’s arrival was not the work of a moment but the product of movement; it was a process, rather than an occasion.¹²

Taking the long view of slavery’s demise broadens and deepens the discussion of who freed the slaves. It places the debate over the roles of President Lincoln, Congress, the Union army, the slaves themselves, and the allied communities of former slaves and descendants of slaves in a broader context, restoring a sense of contingency and undermining the aura of inevitability that attaches itself to a winning cause. The opponents of slavery often argued that history or providence was on their side, but they did not passively wait while history did its work or providence intervened. The goal of a general emancipation, seemingly obvious in retrospect, emerged over time and was only one of the goals the opponents of slavery set for themselves.

The long view exposes with particular clarity the essence of the case against slavery. The bedrock principles on which emancipation rested, often blurred when placed in the context of the shifting tactics and strategies that the opponents of slavery necessarily adopted, appear in sharper focus. Policies changed not only to meet new circumstances, but also to address the masters’ ever-shifting defenses in their day-to-day conflicts. The long view reveals the core of abolitionist support: those advocates of universal freedom whose opposition to slavery never wavered. In the end, emancipation—like other victorious causes—had many friends. But that was not true at the beginning or for most of its history. Viewing the process of emancipation over the course of a near-century identifies those men and women who arrived early and stayed late, as well as the more numerous bystanders.

For similar reasons, the long view suggests the many ways in which emancipation in the United States was at one with the demise of slavery elsewhere in the Atlantic world, where the struggle took many different forms. Just as Britain’s parliamentary Emancipation Act (1833) cannot be seen apart from Quaker manifestos of the 1750s, just as Cuba’s 1880 Ley de Patronato is closely linked to its Moret Law (1870), and just as Brazil’s Golden Law (1888) connects to the Anglo-Brazilian Slave Trade Treaty (1826), so the millions of enslaved men and women freed by wartime emancipation throughout America cannot be separated from the nineteen slaves liberated by Vermont’s 1777 constitution.¹³

The longue durée of emancipation provides a reminder that significant social change requires commitments sometimes extending over generations, and that while the terrain of struggle continually changes, the final goal does not. In the case of the struggle over slavery, the long view connects the arrival of freedom with the post-emancipation standing of former slaves, hence with the debate over citizenship and its attributes, among them race, as well as with the confrontation over property-in-man that made some people rich. At every turn, the coincidence between blackness and slavery necessitated the creation of a new relationship. Emancipation, in short, was a critical moment in the history of racialization—and it, too, was a long process. The era of Reconstruction, generally attached to the post–Civil War struggle under that name, began as the first Africans and African Americans exited slavery and staked their claim to freedom.

But while the long perspective on emancipation clarifies and sharpens understanding, it can also distort. For one thing, it encourages the notion that the demise of slavery was a linear, progressive process—frequently endowed by providence—in which liberty marched ever forward, even in the face of stout opposition. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Thomas Jefferson conceded slavery’s decline and imagined its inevitable end, observing, “The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust … preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation.” As with so many other Jeffersonian contentions respecting African-American slavery and freedom, the master of Monticello was at best partially correct. Although the slaves’ demand for freedom was growing steadily at the end of the eighteenth century, the spirit of the master—including his own mastership—was hardly abating. Jefferson’s opposition to slavery waned over time, if not in principle then certainly in practice. He held more slaves at his death in 1826 than when he had penned his Notes some fifty years earlier. As he aged, Jefferson dissociated himself from even the most cautious proposals to end slavery. He failed to free his own slaves, save for his kin, and deferred the arrival of universal freedom to an indefinite future.¹⁴ For the mass of Southern slaveholders, the commitment to the system of chattel bondage that made them rich and oft-times defined them increased during the next eighty years. American slavery would be stronger in 1800 than it had been in 1775, and stronger still in 1860 than it had been in 1800.

Yet as slavery advanced, so did its opposition. The parallel trajectories of slavery and antislavery pose critical questions about the nature of their relationship. Did the Quakers’ petitions to an unreceptive first Congress, the advent of the African colonization movement, the publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, the organization of the Liberty Party, or John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry lead slave masters to escalate the defense of slavery, or did such advocacy merely expose their long-established positions? Likewise, did the enactment of the Southwest Ordinance, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, or the announcement of the Dred Scott decision incite new antislavery activities or reveal time-honored beliefs? Struggling with these chicken-and-egg questions (Who were the aggressors in the slavery wars? How can we distinguish between newly established positions and the hardening of older ones?), historians have pushed the Southern support for slavery and the Northern commitment to free labor further back in time. Sentiments that were once attributable to John C. Calhoun or William Lloyd Garrison in the mid-nineteenth century have been discerned fifty years earlier.¹⁵ In this seemingly timeless ubiquity, a prime mover in the challenge to or defense of slavery disappears. Slavery and antislavery appear to feed upon each other in a dialectical fashion—a conclusion that may be judicious but is hardly satisfying. At best, the dénouement of the conflict between slavery and antislavery affirmed that emancipation’s road was long and bumpy.

Noting this, historians of emancipation have paid a good deal of attention to the bumps, those moments in which the movement for universal freedom switched gears, seeing them as harbingers of distinctive stages or periods in the long struggle against slavery. They have distinguished between “emancipationists” and “abolitionists,” not only according to their principles (gradualists versus immediatists) but also according to their geographical bases (Pennsylvania versus Massachusetts).¹⁶ The transformation of the movement for universal freedom—from elitist to equalitarian, legalistic to moralistic, secular to evangelical, religious to political, and nonviolent to violent, finally ending triumphantly in the bloody crescendo of civil war—has provided a framework for understanding the long emancipation in the United States.¹⁷

The changes had many sources. The geographic growth of the United States, the democratization of American politics, the new place accorded to women, and the expansion of the market economy, along with the transformation of religious life and the growing literacy of the American people—all reshaped the war against slavery. So, too, did changes within the antislavery movement. But whatever the source of change, when one divides the evolution of the antislavery movement into different periods during which opposition to slavery took distinctive forms, each manifesting its own particular ideologies and rhetoric, strategies and tactics, leaders, cadres, and constituencies, this approach has its limitations. It has provoked endless debates over the roles of different individuals or groups: the primacy of William Lloyd Garrison over Theodore Dwight Weld, evangelicals over politicians, and, most recently, whites over blacks. It has launched a search for previously unknown proponents...