The best recent books on emancipation during the U.S. Civil War

This epic study traces the destruction of slavery throughout the United States during the Civil War. James Oakes argues, provocatively, that the Civil War did not “become” a war against slavery, as most scholars maintain. Instead, Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans were committed to a war against slavery right from the start. Oakes roots Union emancipation policy in the prewar struggles over slavery, as that institution became an all-consuming issue in national politics. Once hostilities commenced, and as enslaved persons responded by seeking shelter behind Union military lines, Republicans were ready to put their emancipationist views into practice. I may not necessarily agree with Oakes’s argument, but his book is a monumental achievement and essential reading on the topic.

In the best scholarly tradition, Joseph P. Reidy manages to synthesize a half-century of groundbreaking scholarship on emancipation during the Civil War era while also anchoring his work in deep archival research and forwarding a unique and original argument. Utilizing the historian’s equivalent of a theory of relativity, Reidy contends that time and place become malleable during moments of upheaval and trauma—such as war and emancipation. Although historians generally adhere fairly strictly to chronology, I find this to be a bold and innovative idea, one that has implications far beyond the study of the U.S. Civil War and emancipation. Time does indeed seem to “stand still” or to move at “warp speed” during a crisis.

Jim Downs offers an essential corrective to the view of emancipation as a kind of liberal or progressive “triumphalist narrative.” Downs approaches the illness and death that the freed people suffered during and after the Civil War as a major public health crisis. He does not question the historical necessity or the morality of emancipation, but he shows that the disruptions and chaos that attended emancipation—often exacerbated by federal policy—also resulted in immeasurable human suffering and countless deaths. Historians have long recognized that emancipation was a messy affair. But what I find especially compelling is that Downs raises the question of whether the hardship caused by federal emancipation policy was intrinsic to that policy (however unintentional) or incidental—what we might call today “collateral damage.”

Thavolia Glymph is one of the nation’s foremost scholars on emancipation, in particular on how questions of gender factored into this process. In this book, she examines the experiences and viewpoints of women in all of their diversity and complexity—those of Black and white women, slave and free, northern and southern, Unionist and Confederate, and of various social and economic classes—during the U.S. Civil War. Glymph shows that while one can speak of a “woman’s” perspective on the war, it was far more often the case that the lives of individual women were shaped by their loyalties and their particular social conditions and circumstances. Gender was essential to understanding the war and emancipation, but it was not—and I think she is right here—necessarily determinative.

Chandra Manning explores an essential but oddly overlooked aspect of wartime emancipation—the experiences of freed people in the “contraband” camps and other places of refuge that the federal military established in occupied Confederate territory. While this might seem like a narrow topic, Manning’s book addresses any number of larger issues surrounding the war and emancipation, and it brims with original insights. She provides an overview of life in these places of “troubled refuge,” but she also delves deeply into particular camps, showing the experiences of individual people. Manning also argues—persuasively, I think—that the camps served as training grounds in which the freed people came to stake a claim not only to freedom but also to equal citizenship guaranteed by the national government.