Beyond Freedom

Disrupting the History of Emancipation

Amy Taylor, Stephen Berry, David W. Blight, Jim Downs

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780820351476
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postemancipation life as a new form of freedom, these essays develop the work of scholars who are looking at how belonging to an empowered government or community defines the outcome of emancipation.

Some essays in this collection disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation. Others offer trenchant renderings of emancipation, with new interpretations of the language and politics of democracy. Still others sidestep academic conventions to speak personally about the politics of emancipation historiography, reconsidering how historians have used source material for understanding subjects such as violence and the suffering of refugee women and children. Together the essays show that the question of freedom—its contested meanings, its social relations, and its beneficiaries—remains central to understanding the complex historical process known as emancipation.

Contributors: Justin Behrend, Gregory P. Downs, Jim Downs, Carole Emberton, Eric Foner, Thavolia Glymph, Chandra Manning, Kate Masur, Richard Newman, James Oakes, Susan O'Donovan, Hannah Rosen, Brenda E. Stevenson.

PART 1

From Slavery to Freedom

The Grammar of Emancipation

Putting Final Freedom in Context

RICHARD NEWMAN

In the bucolic Mount Hope Cemetery of Rochester, New York, a pair of nineteenth-century graves illuminate the incredible distance American emancipation has traveled since Civil War times. At one end of the cemetery, signs lead visitors to Frederick Douglass’s gravesite, where flowers and American flags honor the nation’s most important black abolitionist. On the other side, an ordinary headstone marks the burial plot of Dr. John Van Evrie, the most notorious northern racist of the era.¹ With no signs pointing to Van Evrie’s grave, few people know that the fire-breathing anti-abolitionist lies near the herald of black freedom. Yet the historical irony of that fact provides lasting satisfaction to those who discover it.

During the 1860s, however, a different story took shape. For Van Evrie spoke to a significant portion of northern as well as southern whites who rejected emancipation nationally. From the U.S. North to the Caribbean, Van Evrie claimed, black freedom had failed. While Douglass mined emancipation’s past to make the opposite case, he found Van Evrie’s worldview hard to overcome. “It is a sad fact that the people of this country are, as yet, on a plane of morality and philanthropy far below what the exigencies of the cause of human progress demands,” Douglass wrote from Rochester in June 1860. Indeed, it “is to be regretted that they will not come up to the glorious work of striking the shackles from four million slaves at a single blow.”² Van Evrie symbolized the entrenched belief among many white Americans that emancipation was anathema to the thriving republic—and more importantly, perhaps, that previous emancipations regionally and nationally remained problematic. In fact, until his death in 1896—just a year after Douglass—the good doctor remained an intellectual redoubt of anti-abolitionism. Not until a second Reconstruction a century later would his views fade from mainstream American culture.

Along the way, it seems, the world of emancipation that gave shape to Van Evrie’s anti-abolitionism has been lost to many historians of Civil War freedom.³ Though scholars have thoroughly undermined triumphalist narratives of final freedom after 1865, they have largely ignored the contested terrain of early emancipation that engendered Civil War debates over black liberty in the first place.⁴ In this sense, they have reified the idea that final freedom was a product of the war years alone. But as the tale of Douglass and Van Evrie shows, mid-nineteenth-century Americans were well attuned to emancipation’s embattled past in Atlantic society. From gradual abolition in the North to British and French emancipation in the Caribbean, experiments in black liberty (as many Americans saw them) framed everything from Union confiscation and contraband policies to providential interpretations of southern freedom itself. To even think about American emancipation in the 1860s was to conjure a complex set of ideas about black freedom long since set in motion.

One might call this the grammar of emancipation: a way of conjuring black freedom that was in a very real sense programmed into Civil War Americans. Though embedded in language, the grammar of emancipation transcended mere words. Rather, it was a broad set of ideas and beliefs (codes and rules, in a way) that ordered how many Americans conceived of black freedom.⁵ Only by understanding the embattled nature of that grammar can we recover the halting, surprising, and sometimes disappointing roads toward emancipation in the Civil War and beyond.

Early Lessons: The Grammar of Northern Emancipation

Civil War Americans knew that their own emancipation history was nearly a century old by the time sectional battle erupted. While many citizens celebrated the era of northern gradualism that eradicated bondage above the Mason-Dixon Line, others saw early emancipation as problematic. Though glad to see slavery ended, many northerners did not embrace racial equality as an abolitionist corollary. As Joanne Melish has pointed out, concerns about northern freedom shadowed Massachusetts emancipation in the early republic, with whites worrying that blacks would become “slaves to the community”—civic dependents in need of constant governmental support.⁶ In Pennsylvania, abolitionist convert Ben Franklin believed that enslaved blacks required white oversight to learn the meaning of freedom. Many African Americans protested these notions. As Richard Allen argued in 1794, liberated African Americans should not have to demonstrate their “superior good conduct” to be treated equally in the North.⁷ Yet, with even white reformers exhibiting concerns about black freedom in the early republic, it is little wonder that colonization long remained popular in the North.⁸

With black freedom a contested part of northern society, antebellum abolitionists became well versed in defending it. Philadelphia reformers produced roughly a half dozen major censuses documenting free blacks’ economic productivity and communal stability to overcome doubts about abolition (W. E. B. Du Bois later modeled The Philadelphia Negro, which launched the field of urban sociology, on these studies). Nevertheless, fears of unruly African Americans led to an era of racial retrenchment: by the 1840s, free blacks were disfranchised in virtually every state above the Mason-Dixon Line while segregation reigned in everything from schools to streetcars. Though opposition to the slave power grew more intense by mid-century, mainstream white northerners still worried about the legacy of early abolitionism. As Pennsylvania congressman Charles Brown noted in 1849, northerners did not believe black equality would be an analog to earlier emancipations. But now, that very prospect—equality as part of abolition—illustrated the true folly of broad emancipation programs in the South.⁹

As Brown’s words suggest, lingering doubts about northern emancipation easily spilled over into fears about a second (and much bigger) southern liberation. During the presidential election of 1860, some northern papers predicted that Republican victory would unleash a hoard of enslaved people on the other parts of the nation, many of whom would spread the contagion of racial unrest to the North, Midwest, and West.¹⁰ Such comments flowed not from a lunatic fringe but from years of debate about the “visionary” and “Jacobin” schemes of northern abolitionists and free black activists. Across the early wartime North, a band of emancipation critics argued that abolitionists had fomented sectional strife to expand the failed emancipation policies of earlier times. As George McHenry, the former head of the Philadelphia Board of Trade, claimed in 1862, northern emancipation had produced generations of African American paupers, criminals, and vagabonds and was no model for the South.¹¹ Paying no heed to abolitionists’ studies proving otherwise, McHenry argued vehemently that mass black freedom would ruin the North as well as the South.

The mere discussion of ad hoc black liberty uncovered such fears. In the early 1860s a host of writers, politicians, and racial scientists argued that confiscation and contraband policies would map the failures of northern abolition onto the nation. The result? White democracy no less than the Confederacy would be endangered if not destroyed. Even when Union fugitive slave policies undercut Confederate strength, some northerners worried that a “sudden” emancipation of southern blacks would harm the nation. In abolition’s longtime home, for instance, the pro-Union Philadelphia Inquirer wondered if confiscation would lead to the “sudden emancipation” of millions of “semi-savages” inside Union lines. Other Pennsylvania papers believed that contraband and confiscation edicts had already set southern blacks “adrift,” with many streaming north.¹² Borrowing from years of northern antiblack discourses, one Pennsylvania correspondent suggested sending “contrabands” to Haiti to “quiet any sensitiveness in relation to too sudden and great increase in our free Negro population.” Another paper urged resettling “contrabands in Indian country” as a way of preventing them from moving North and degenerating into “idleness.” As Pennsylvania congressman Charles Biddle summed up in 1862, the contraband question was really a “Negro question” and thus a referendum on black liberty north and south. And as a “white man and Pennsylvanian,” Biddle rejected black wartime freedom.¹³

No one tilled anti-abolition ground more effectively than New Yorker John Van Evrie. A medical doctor steeped in the new field of racial science, Van Evrie became the North’s leading intellectual opponent of black freedom. As he consistently claimed, both science and philosophy proved that blacks occupied a distinct and inferior space in the human chain of being—something he called “savagism.” Thus, as abolitionists called for emancipation, Van Evrie pressed harder for “Subgenation”: white racial domination north and south. For Van Evrie, “Antislaveryism” was no philanthropic belief but a disease that had been “the cause of secession.” If white northerners were not careful, “Antislaveryism” and “Free Negroism” would ruin the country, too. Indeed, as he put it plainly in “Free Negroism,” a representative tract from 1862, Civil War Americans could gain a glimpse of the South’s potential “free” future by glancing at the North, where black freedom had almost killed white liberty.¹⁴

Van Evrie’s literature and ideas pervaded northern urban areas, where Democrats and conservative Republicans vied for the support of white working men fearful of blacks’ impact on the economic order. But they also penetrated the countryside. ( Jefferson Davis praised a Van Evrie work that appeared in the mid-Atlantic region before the war.)¹⁵ In Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and other midwestern locales, strains of Van Evrie’s bald anti-abolitionism remained a powerful part of civic discourse well into the Reconstruction era. Already by the 1860s, however, debates over the meaning of black freedom and white supremacy filtered into seemingly secure antislavery locales such as Iowa. Spawned by African American mobility during the war, as well as black claims to equality in the civic sphere, these debates often (though not always) flowed from white citizens’ sense of “entitlements accorded by race”: whites’ belief in the normative nature of prevailing economic and political structures, where they occupied unquestioned positions of power and control.¹⁶ While some midwestern whites laudably reconsidered their views, others fit black freedom into a neat box that borrowed from the prevailing grammar of emancipation: newly freed African Americans would be treated not as equals but rather a servile class. For this reason, African Americans recognized the need to mobilize anew in the American heartland during and after the war.

Van Evrie’s anti-abolitionism was much more crude and vicious than the racism registered in many parts of the American North and Midwest. But in another key sense it was a more elegantly framed and thus appealing explication of black inferiority. Garbed in a discourse of science and statistics, Van Evrie’s work did not claim black inferiority in mere philosophical terms but sought to prove it via rigorous study of the known world of emancipation. For this reason, Van Evrie’s work would not be dismissed. And it made its mark on the way that wartime emancipation was depicted. It is well to remember that prior to 1863, the Union’s proto-emancipation policies were never framed as patriotic and glorious but as pragmatic and necessary. Clearly, Union policy makers worried about the racial dimensions of even limited liberty in the South. And when Lincoln proposed a national plan of compensated gradual emancipation to the border states in early 1862, he carefully calibrated his message to account for these fears. By embracing gradual abolition in the Upper South, Lincoln asserted, Americans everywhere would avoid the bugaboo of “sudden” emancipation; by linking gradualism to colonization, Americans would also drain troublesome free blacks from the white republic.¹⁷ In no small way, the grammar of emancipation dictated the president’s talking points about wartime black freedom.

Even after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Unionists carefully measured northern support for black liberty. Members of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC), charged by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in 1863 with studying emancipation in and beyond the United States, circulated questionnaires about free blacks in the North. Were free blacks good or bad, industrious or insane, competent or criminal? While many respondents replied that free blacks were a small and genial presence in their midst, these questions conceded northerners’ discomfort with their own emancipation history. The grammar of the first emancipation had defined black liberty as inherently problematic and constantly in need of critical investigation. For any Civil War policy maker, black freedom’s contested history was easily conjured and not so easily dismissed.

International Grammar: Atlantic Emancipations

If time (i.e., the northern abolitionist past) served as one axis along which Civil War Americans interpreted the potential meaning of national emancipation, then space (emancipation’s global geography) served as another key reference point. What were the results of Atlantic emancipations, Union military officials and politicians wondered as wartime liberty loomed? As Samuel Gridley Howe, one of the three AFIC representatives, put it, “Now, when everybody is asking what shall be done with the Negroes—and many are afraid that they cannot take care of themselves if left alone” after a looming southern emancipation, Americans desperately needed information on global black liberty. Howe thought Canada West would illuminate global emancipation’s surprising ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part 1. From Slavery to Freedom
• Part 2. The Politics of Freedom
• Part 3. Meditations on the Meaning of Freedom
• Contributors
• Index