Choice Review

Williams (Valdosta State Univ.) has written a provocative, authoritative entry into the scholarly debate over African American emancipation in the Civil War era. He takes issue with those who argue that slavery was ended primarily by national leaders and the political process that culminated in the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Rather, he argues, blacks were largely "self-emancipated"-the collective weight of their own actions against the teetering institution of slavery. In Williams's telling, emancipation was thus a process of both Northern and Southern African Americans pushing a reluctant class of leaders to frame policies that only partially reflected the actual progress of blacks' claiming freedom for themselves. Therefore, the full potential of emancipation was never realized, with white resistance (both implicit and explicit) limiting freedmen's and freedwomen's scope of liberty. Williams's archival research is prodigious and his argument convincing. The book renders African Americans active agents, rather than largely passive recipients, in the process of emancipation and is thus a counterpoint to the national emphasis of recent works such as James Oakes's Freedom National (CH, Jul'13, 50-6375). A must read for students of the era. --Kevin M. Gannon, Grand View University