As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly.
In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.
ISBN-13: 9781469661568
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication Date: 08-01-2020
Pages: 520
Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)
Series: Littlefield History of the Civil War Era
Joseph P. Reidy is professor emeritus of history at Howard University.
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From the Publisher
Reidy's remarkable Illusions of Emancipation puts us in the midst of revolutionary events as only history's participants could have made and experienced them. Reidy offers us multiple perspectives on moments of trauma, triumph, and everyday life that reveal emancipation as the unexpected, determined, lurching, and slippery process that it was, driven by struggles of many sorts in an environment of volatility and uncertainty. Compelling reading for anyone interested in how history unfolds.—Steven Hahn, author of A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
