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Summary
Summary
Freedom National is a groundbreaking history of emancipation that joins the political initiatives of Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress with the courageous actions of Union soldiers and runaway slaves in the South. It shatters the widespread conviction that the Civil War was first and foremost a war to restore the Union and only gradually, when it became a military necessity, a war to end slavery. These two aims--"Liberty and Union, one and inseparable"--were intertwined in Republican policy from the very start of the war. By summer 1861 the federal government invoked military authority to begin freeing slaves, immediately and without slaveholder compensation, as they fled to Union lines in the disloyal South. In the loyal Border States the Republicans tried coaxing officials into gradual abolition with promises of compensation and the colonization abroad of freed blacks. James Oakes shows that Lincoln's landmark 1863 proclamation marked neither the beginning nor the end of emancipation: it triggered a more aggressive phase of military emancipation, sending Union soldiers onto plantations to entice slaves away and enlist the men in the army. But slavery proved deeply entrenched, with slaveholders determined to re-enslave freedmen left behind the shifting Union lines. Lincoln feared that the war could end in Union victory with slavery still intact. The Thirteenth Amendment that so succinctly abolished slavery was no formality: it was the final act in a saga of immense war, social upheaval, and determined political leadership. Fresh and compelling, this magisterial history offers a new understanding of the death of slavery and the rebirth of a nation.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Eliminating slavery proved harder "than anyone first imagined," writes Oakes (The Radical and the Republican), professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, in this richly satisfying account. Ironically, the Constitution was "one of the most formidable obstacles to abolition-"enlightenment economics taught that slavery would eventually disappear, so the Founding Fathers felt little was lost in placating southern states by writing protections into the document. As deferent to the Constitution as their opponents, Republicans never supported abolishing slavery where it was legal, and though Lincoln maintained "that he would take no stance that went against his party," Southern states saw the election of 1860 as a harbinger of abolition. It was, however, a slow process: by war's end a mere 15% of four million slaves were free. Congressman James Wilson remarked, "slavery was a `condemned' but `unexecuted culprit.' " Only with the 1865 ratification of the 13th Amendment were all slaves freed, "everywhere, for all future time." Both a refreshing take on a moment in history and a primer on the political process, Oakes's study is thoroughly absorbing. Maps & illus. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A finely argued book about how the destruction of slavery involved much more than Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Oakes (History/CUNY Graduate Center; The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, 2007, etc.) returns to the notion that slavery, rather than states' rights or "an outbreak of hysteria, irrationality and paranoia," was truly the origin of the Civil War. In order to challenge the Constitutional consensus on slavery, the anti-slavery activists had to appeal to the broad principles of "natural law," to which the Framers had implicitly referred. Also, opponents of slavery had to make the convincing argument that slaves were in fact not property, using the Somersett case in England as a legal benchmark. In addition to the Emancipation Proclamation, Oakes reveals the many smaller but significant victories for the opponents of slavery--e.g., New York's 1799 emancipation law and John Quincy Adams' eloquent defense of the slave ship Amistad's rebels before the Supreme Court. Proponents of the Liberty Party asserted that slavery was not a national institution, but peculiar to certain states and suitable to be "cordoned off," thus underscoring the importance of the border states during the Civil War as "containment" of the slave contagion; on the other hand, freedom, they believed, was national and not able to be restricted locally. Oakes wades through extremely nuanced arguments that evolved over time in the North and South, in Congress, in the military and in the mind of Lincoln. However, only 13 percent of the 4 million slaves living in the South were freed by the end of the war, prompting the necessity for a 13th Amendment to ensure Southern tractability. A useful contribution to the literature about slavery and the Civil War.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Long before the Civil War, the age of emancipation was marked by antislavery movements throughout the Caribbean empire and the British ban on slavery. Historian Oakes details how the U.S., despite its heritage of freedom, was much slower to adopt a national ideal of freedom, drudging through a long, painful, and very complicated process that did not necessarily have to lead to the Thirteenth Amendment. The greatest obstacle to antislavery efforts was the constitutional protection of slavery in states where it existed. Fervent debates about how to end slavery included directives to isolate the South, offer incentives and compensation, or exercise the military option that meant immediate emancipation and no compensation. Oakes examines the history of the antislavery movement, slave resistance, Lincoln's political machinations, the Republican Party, the Civil War, and the revisionist history of the intent of the political players in the 1800s as seen through more modern perspectives. This is an absorbing look at the complex process of emancipation and the forces behind the incentives and threats and the war that eventually led to the end of slavery in the U.S.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Oakes (Graduate Center, CUNY) has written the definitive study of the Republican Party and emancipation during the Civil War. Taking issue with scholarship that posits the reluctance of many Republicans (including Abraham Lincoln) to push for complete and effective emancipation--thus rendering freedom the exclusive province of African Americans and "radicals"--Oakes instead emphasizes the essential unity of the Republicans on slavery and emancipation. Moderate and radical Republicans were committed to emancipation as a war aim from 1861 forward; their differences were over timing and tone rather than substance. The only Northerners trying to avoid slavery and emancipation were Democrats, who never effectively exercised national power during the war. Analyzing emancipation as it progressed from a military measure (confiscation) to an explicitly avowed war aim (the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation) to final constitutional implementation (the 13th Amendment), Oakes crafts a detailed, vigorously argued, convincing narrative of how emancipation became a settled (if not uncontested) fact. It is difficult to do justice to Oakes's masterful study in a brief review; wide research, exceptional prose, and deft argumentation combine in this important work. Required reading for any student of the Civil War era. Summing Up: Essential. All readers/libraries. K. M. Gannon Grand View University
Library Journal Review
Lincoln Prize-winner Oakes argues that the Civil War was fought not to preserve the Union (the standard line) but primarily to end slavery; he also chronicles the immediate consequences of emancipation. See David Von Drehle's just-published Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year for a different approach to the subject. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.