1300 words; 6 minutes. Posted January 31, 2024, in Virginia from near where Point Comfort, the 1619 place, combines with Fort Monroe to make the preeminent historic landscape for national memory of emancipation.
At The Emancipator—an online reimagining of the antebellum abolitionist publication that The Self-Emancipator’s name also recalls—Wellesley College’s Kellie Carter Jackson presents a three-minute video with a potentially controversy-inciting title: “Lincoln Didn’t Free The Enslaved. They Freed Themselves.”
The video summarizes a momentous but perplexingly overlooked American story that’s slowly beginning to advance in national memory. The Self-Emancipator monitors and advocates the advance. I hope multitudes watch the video—and then ask Ken Burns, who told the momentous story in an earlier effort long ago, to tell it anew.
PICTURED: Professor Kellie Carter Jackson of Wellesley College and The Emancipator, a collaboration between Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research and the Boston Globe. The Emancipator focuses on “explaining and identifying solutions to structural racism.” Carter Jackson’s Emancipator colleagues include Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Jelani Cobb of Columbia University and The New Yorker, Princeton's Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Joy Reid of MSNBC, Harvard's Annette Gordon-Reed, who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her Sally Hemings-related work, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the New York Times's 1619 Project and whose introductory essay for it—“Our Democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true”—also won a Pulitzer.
To see the video title’s controversy potential, consider what followed Jamelle Bouie’s Juneteenth 2020 New York Times column declaring “Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.” As discussed in the Self-Emancipator posting “Jamelle Bouie gets it; National Review critic doesn’t,” within a week, the old-line conservatives at National Review ran a long rebuttal with a subheadline charging a “dishonest effort to rewrite history.”
“Dishonest”? Geez.
It’s true that some historians would caution that Bouie and Carter Jackson overstate. The two have enthusiastically pressed what’s predicted in The Self-Emancipator’s footer: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing Civil War slavery escapees. Just not yet.”
Also true: National Review’s rebuttal vividly illustrates the not yet. But surely traditional conservatives, themselves natural advocates for enterprising self-reliance, will eventually admire and fully credit those freedom-striving Americans. Just not yet.
Though it’s a story for all sides in the history wars, some historians and other observers argue over what constitutes fully credit. Some even harbor a belief that to elevate esteem for high-consequence self-agency in those emancipation-forcing multitudes is to diminish esteem for the historic agency and stature of President Lincoln—even though Lincoln himself freely wrote of being controlled by events.
The Self-Emancipator posting “Historians on the term self-emancipation” reports on the elevation vs. diminishment concern. So does the late, preeminent emancipation scholar Ira Berlin’s 2015 book The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, which addresses both scholars and the public.
A quarter century earlier, Professor Berlin had directly addressed the public in a Washington Post op-ed headlined “How the Slaves Freed Themselves.” His 2015 book repeated1 the op-ed’s most important line: “No one was more responsible for smashing the shackles of slavery than the slaves.”
This op-ed passage reappears2 nearly verbatim in the book:
From the first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the slaves themselves. Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom—and that of their posterity—atop the national agenda. Steadily, as opportunities arose, slaves risked all for freedom by abandoning their owners, coming uninvited into Union lines and offering their help as laborers, pioneers, guides and spies.
So Berlin’s view connects directly with the assertion by Carter Jackson, Bouie, and others that the enslaved freed themselves. Hundreds of thousands did so directly and literally, whatever is to be said about the political thicket of emancipation’s legal complexity.
One by one or in small groups, with no one whispering “Freedom” in their ears, they freed themselves. They stood up like the real Americans they were, took the initiative to—in Berlin’s phrasing—risk all, escaped across Union lines, and in effect claimed their dignity and rights under the laws of nature and of nature’s god.
PICTURED: Ira Berlin’s 2015 book cover. In the 2008 essay “They Chose Freedom,” no less than James M. McPherson invoked the “imprimatur” of Berlin’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project to establish how dominant—McPherson’s word—a “self-emancipation thesis” had become during and since the 1980s among scholars considering the question “Who freed the slaves?” Yet I suspect that both McPherson and Berlin would caution against oversimplification in Carter Jackson’s three-minute story. (All the more reason to hope that new multitudes watch the video—and then ask Ken Burns to retell the story too.)
Questions
Maybe The Emancipator—like Mr. Burns after he gets those calls—will address in more than three minutes the momentous but perplexingly scanted story of those multitudes of Civil War slavery escapees. If so, it appears to me that it would mean addressing questions engaged by Berlin and other scholars who agree about what Berlin calls “the primacy of black people” in “slavery’s demise.”3
Here’s one such question: Galling as it is to see 2024 arrive with still no widespread recognition of the freedom strivers’ self-agency, can the story really be simplified down to the video’s first few sentences? With dignified passion, Carter Jackson begins this way:
Abraham Lincoln did not free the enslaved. The enslaved freed themselves. For decades, historians have argued for the agency of Black Americans in securing their own liberation during the Civil War. But time and time again, Lincoln is touted by his most well-known monikers: the Great Emancipator, or Savior of the Union.
As a force for Black freedom, President Lincoln plainly does get remembered extensively for symbolizing what Berlin calls4 the “hand of constituted authority” in contrast to the mostly ignored yet highly—Carter Jackson says dispositively—consequential “hand of ordinary people.” But what about the Civil War itself, guided—to the extent it could be guided—by Lincoln? It’s often observed that enslaved Americans knew that if the war came, it would bring a colossal freedom opportunity. But would the war have come at all if the country hadn’t chosen Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election?
And what about Union soldiers’ and sailors’ contributions and sacrifices as a force for Black freedom? True, Berlin says5 that “more than 135,000 slave men would become Union soldiers”; true, some 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors served overall. But the multiracial total Union forces, involving Americans of all descriptions, were very much larger still. Did the enslaved free themselves without that help?
In that 1992 “How the Slaves Freed Themselves” op-ed, Berlin stipulated that Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation’s place in the drama of emancipation” was “secure.” He added, “To deny it is to ignore the deep struggle by which freedom arrived.” His 2015 The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States declares, “Slaves were not the only movers in the drama of emancipation.”6
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A problem here is that political thicket of legal complexity in emancipation—the “hand of constituted authority.” The “hand of ordinary people” forced emancipation far more than critics like those at National Review recognize, and far more extensively than national civic memory yet esteems.
That’s why I recommend Professor Carter Jackson’s short video so strongly, why I value what Mr. Burns already did concerning all of this in his Civil War series more than a third of a century ago, wish that he would take up the momentous but perplexingly overlooked story anew in the changed history-wars circumstances, and expect that in national civic memory the missing esteem will eventually flourish.
Just not yet.
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