Civil War History

In Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery, Joseph Reidy offers a sweeping portrait of black liberation from the Civil War to the beginning of the Radical Reconstruction period. In American history, there is a tendency to believe that emancipation was immediate and relatively uniform. But Reidy argues that legal and military action combined did not provide the instant solution to black American life. He powerfully contends that emancipation was a process, unfolding differently for black Americans all across the country. Emancipation created expectations or beliefs about what freedom entailed and to what freedom entitled black people as a newly adopted citizens. It looked one way for former slaves grappling with life in the South and another for free black Northerners grappling with the protections and provisions of citizenship. Moreover, after the Civil War, freedom generally felt uncertain to newly freed slaves. Reidy explains, "The collapse [of slavery] did not necessarily occur in one fell swoop but in a series of incremental movements, backward as well as forward, some more fleeting than others" (20). Accordingly, the process of liberation provided hope and frustration.

Reidy divides his work into three interrelated frameworks to help readers understand how black Americans reconciled the events unfolding about them through the lens of time, space, and home. While time and space shaped the contours of black life, with its restrictions, boundaries, and possibilities, home has always been a fraught concept in black life. The idea of "going home" after the war was not the same for soldiers as for the enslaved. Slavery and the war undermined every positive possible meaning for the word home. Anti-black violence at the local and state level as well as political disenfranchisement made the idea of home just as elusive as the concept of freedom. In many ways, freedom felt like approaching a horizon that could never be reached. The countless stories of struggle and retracted promises in Illusions of Emancipation stunted black progression. Reidy's work poignantly illustrates why there was "little wonder that the question repeatedly arose whether the Union's victory over the Confederacy left any lasting accomplishments or whether it, too, was an illusion" (21). [End Page 145]

Reidy writes that even when the Thirteenth Amendment was made the law of the land, it offered little direction for African Americans. Yes, slavery had come to an end, but what was next? "It said only what was not to be," Reidy explained. The Thirteenth Amendment said nothing of "what was to be, which they [African Americans] desperately wanted to know" (266). For decades, scholars and activists have been asking: where do we go from here? By using the final chapter to focus on the idea of home, Reidy features the myriad of ways black men and women attempted to lay claim to their humanity, citizenship, and political enfranchisement. The fight for black people was always about enjoying the full measure of liberty in the land of their birth and this struggle continues with us today.

Illusions of Emancipation is deeply researched and packed with insights and rich anecdotes drawn from the Freedom and Southern Society Project (FSSP), which contains volumes of personal and political accounts regarding experiences of enslaved people from 1861 to 1867. Drawing on the immense resources of the National Archives of the United States, the project editors of the FSSP selected nearly fifty thousand documents from millions related to how formerly enslaved people navigated emancipation from 1861 to the beginnings of Reconstruction. Reidy poses no easy solutions but rather compels us to consider the crippling inability of America's legislative bodies to reach consensus regarding the rights and privileges African Americans could enjoy as citizens. Reidy has given the field of Civil War history a gift. Freedom was and is complicated. By illustrating how black Americans did...