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Summary
Summary
Ira Berlin offers a framework for understanding slavery's demise in the United States. Emancipation was not an occasion but a century-long process of brutal struggle by generations of African Americans who were not naive about the price of freedom. Just as slavery was initiated and maintained by violence, undoing slavery also required violence.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
University of Maryland historian Berlin (Many Thousands Gone) has studied American slavery from its origins through its demise, and in this short, tightly constructed monograph he focuses on the latter process, which after a century and a half "remains very much alive among us and about us." The work, based on his 2014 Nathan I. Huggins lectures in African-American history at Harvard, centers on whether emancipation came as the result of centuries of liberation struggles on the part of the enslaved, or if it was the gift of "constituted authority" on the part of Abraham Lincoln. That debate maps onto the wider issue of whether the majority of slaves were in constant, if often secret, forms of resistance to their bondage, or whether they accommodated themselves to their plight and hoped simply to ameliorate their situation. In Berlin's view, "the demise of slavery was not so much a proclamation as a movement" that played out in various ways across the plantation societies of the Atlantic. All were characterized by black resistance, violent struggle, and a stated desire for freedom and citizenship. Writing for a general audience, Berlin lucidly illuminates the "near-century-long" process of abolition and how, in many ways, the work of emancipation continues today. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The cause of the end of slavery in the U.S. is a long, complex story that is usually, in the general reading public's mind, simplified by the Civil War ended it. In this remarkably cogent, impressively thought-out, and even beautifully styled account by a university historian, we are given emphatic witness to his long-held professional conviction that freedom's arrival, as he phrases it, was not due to a moment or a man but because of a process that took a century to unfold. One of Berlin's foremost ideas concerning emancipation rises from his findings that, above all, the difficult history of the movement against slavery found its bedrock in the active resistance of both free and slave-held black people. That slaves stood against slavery was irrefutable proof that abolition was possible and not just a reformer's dream. As Berlin perceives it, the issue of emancipation automatically opened the question of what the citizenship status of former black slaves would be. Nothing seemed more natural to people of color than that all Americans should be equal. And accompanying the steps to emancipation was the ever-presence of violence, which was inherent in the process. This summary analysis of emancipation should be on the shelves of all public library history and social science collections.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IRA BERLIN RANKS as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States, in no small part because of his commitment to readers beyond academia. For almost four decades, he has been the moving force behind the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, based at the University of Maryland. He and his colleagues at the project have combed through millions of documents generated by emancipation and Reconstruction. They have found amazing characters, like the newly commissioned, recently liberated black soldiers who sent letters to their former masters, demanding that these white Southerners hand over still-enslaved family members. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project has released 10 volumes, as well as numerous other publications. Each one opens windows into Reconstruction, a period of American history that is not yet over. For, as Berlin insists in the opening to "The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States," "History is not about the past; it is about arguments we have about the past." When people argue about what the past means, they are usually debating about the present, and it would be hard to think of a period of American history more relevant to the present than the Reconstruction Era. For the arguments about whether Reconstruction "worked" are about what to do today to shape tomorrow. The discussions we need to have about the long movement for emancipation in the United States before the Civil War, the focus of Berlin's new book, are just as timely. The story begins with the American Revolution, which led to the halting emancipation of New England's slaves. It continues through the early 1800s, when slavery was expanding rapidly in the cotton South. Most Northern whites were happy to spend money generated by cotton slavery, while simultaneously creating patterns of segregation that presaged Jim Crow - some of which still haven't been eradicated. Yet by the 1830s, as Berlin tells us, something new was emerging: a movement that insisted that the lives of the black people trapped in slavery mattered more than white profit. Based primarily in Northern free black communities - demonstrating what Berlin calls "the primacy of black people" - and drawing its ideas from African-American critiques of the hypocrisy of American freedom, the drive for nationwide abolition was always relatively small. Abolitionists were criticized, attacked by mobs and police forces and treated with contempt by mainstream politicians. Yet this movement changed the world by destroying politics-as-usual and forcing the country to confront its greatest contradiction. "The Long Emancipation" began as a series of lectures Berlin delivered at Harvard in 2014, and it gives us an overview of abolitionism's history. Many readers will want additional information about the particular stories touched on in this book, and Berlin builds on a rich array of other studies cited in his notes that they can read to learn more about the subject. But for others, the brief but knowledgeable survey that Berlin provides here will be all they require. "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. Most Northern whites were happy to spend money generated by slavery. EDWARD E. BAPTIST, a professor of history at Cornell University, is the author of "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism."
Choice Review
Berlin (Univ. of Maryland), a leading authority on the history of antebellum free blacks, North American slavery, and the emancipation process, has written a short, fast-paced interpretive history of the transition of African Americans from chattels to free persons. He challenges previous scholars who identify both a "moment" and a human factor that sparked emancipation--generally either President Abraham Lincoln or the South's slaves--for initiating slavery's overthrow. Instead, Berlin takes the long view in charting emancipation's circuitous metamorphosis, from the late 18th century until the 1860s. Two consistent themes punctuated emancipation across time and place. First, African Americans, influenced by the Declaration of Independence, led the crusade, consistently demanding and acting out their determination for unconditional freedom. Second, throughout its long history, emancipation constituted a violent, often bloody struggle. Berlin chronicles "the ceaseless carnage that manifested itself in every confrontation between master and slave." The black quest for freedom "left a trail of destroyed property, broken bones, traumatized men and women, and innumerable lifeless bodies. It was manifested in direct confrontations, kidnappings, pogroms, riots, insurrections, and finally open warfare." In the end, Berlin credits black persons, north and south, for gradually but forcefully removing slavery's stain from the fabric of American life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels and libraries. --John David Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte