Historians on the term 'self-emancipation'
Blight: Not wrong; "too operatic." Guelzo: "Marxist conceit." Williams: Slavery escapees made the Civil War a "freedom war."
July 25, 2023. If you’re not sure what this Substack newsletter is all about, please consider reading the short introductory posting “Why ‘The Self-Emancipator’?” and maybe also its continuation, “Rereading ‘How Slavery Really Ended in America.’” Subscribe for free.
The term self-emancipation came up fast when the New York Times in 2015 asked David Blight, “Was the end of slavery not accomplished by the slaves themselves?”
He’s the Frederick Douglass biographer who directs Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He answered that emancipation was “both the result of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation … and the brave volition and actions of the slaves themselves,” as seen in their “thousands of individual decisions … to strike out for their own liberation.”
Citing the complex “crooked path” to emancipation, with its political and military dimensions, he declared that the “very term self-emancipation has sometimes been forced to carry too much weight and significance. It is simply too operatic.”
Princeton’s Allen C. Guelzo, three-time winner of historians’ Lincoln Prize, credits only President Lincoln. He adamantly dismisses what James M. McPherson sees as a “self-emancipation thesis” that during the 1980s “became dominant” in scholarly understanding of emancipation’s Civil War political evolution.
David Williams’s I Freed Myself, from Cambridge University Press, presents as centrally important in that evolution what its subtitle calls “African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era.” Williams says the “Emancipation Proclamation may have been signed with Lincoln's pen, but Blacks were its author.”*
David Williams’s self-emancipation study’s cover borrows the 1863 lithograph “Blow for Blow.”
With Guelzo a prominent exception, historians in recent decades have regularly seen historic importance in the self-agency of Civil War slavery escapees. Like Blight and Williams, they see those enterprising freedom strivers as having subtracted themselves from the Confederacy to add themselves, as Americans, to the Union. Eric Foner has emphasized that they “forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.”
This Substack newsletter monitors and advocates national civic memory’s unfolding awareness of that high-consequence Black self-agency. But I’m not a historian. I’m a public history advocate who has named his Substack with an allusively freighted variation of the sometimes controversial historical term self-emancipation. So it’s important to clarify that actual historians’ views of Civil War self-emancipation vary.
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To restate this newsletter’s founding assumption: National public memory remains mostly, and unfortunately, oblivious to Black agency’s place in the Civil War’s transformation from a war for union to a war for union and freedom.
That puzzling near-obliviousness even mars (as of July 2023) a formal online statement from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, founded a century ago by the father of Black history, Carter G. Woodson. The pronouncement addresses momentous self-emancipator-initiated events that prefigured emancipation. They took place in May 1861, only weeks into the Civil War, at Fort Monroe, the Union’s mighty, and mighty symbolic, bastion in Confederate Virginia. It’s on Point Comfort, where the first captive Africans had arrived in 1619.
McPherson says Fort Monroe “tells the story of the end of slavery in America.” But the association’s statement overcredits politically powerful white men and scants Black agency’s importance in starting the Civil War’s transformation. Along with President Obama in a short embedded video, the statement even disrespects the story’s three originators—enterprising, self-emancipating slavery escapees Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend. It fails to confer the simple dignity of naming them. After all, they were just “slaves,” right?
The Woodson statement—including the video—also supports the common but false elevation of the token national stewardship status of Fort Monroe, the preeminent American landscape for remembering self-emancipation. It misrepresents the severely limited, weirdly bifurcated national monument that overdevelopment-focused, Potemkin village-inspired politicians got President Obama to establish when the Army retired the post in 2011. The next Self-Emancipator will address that affront to national civic memory.
Civil War self-emancipation has also been underappreciated in discussions of the phenomenon’s antebellum antecedents. Williams notes that the term self-emancipation was commonly used before the Civil War, “falling out of favor in the postwar era as whites increasingly claimed credit for ending slavery.”** As of July 2023, the American Battlefield Trust web page “Self-Emancipation: The Act of Freeing Oneself From Slavery” scants Civil War self-emancipation. The National Park Service page “Self-Emancipation” outright omits it. That's like recalling the early space program’s Project Mercury without linkage to the Apollo moon landing.
Other historians have minimized self-emancipation's importance by arguing that even before the war, the Republican Party had laid plans for slavery’s destruction. In 2013, halfway through the four-year Civil War sesquicentennial, University of Richmond then-president Edward L. Ayers chaired a Library of Virginia panel discussion, “Legacy of the American Civil War.” Two years earlier, he had declared Fort Monroe’s May 1861 self-emancipator-initiated events “the greatest moment in American history.”
That moment began when Baker, Mallory, and Townsend made its first decision, the active one to risk escaping slavery to seek freedom with the Union. They persuaded Fort Monroe’s commanding general, Benjamin Butler, to make the moment’s second decision, the reactive one not to send them back to slavery. Only that second decision—with its then-useful, but ever problematic and misleading meme of a name, “Contraband Decision”—has a place in national civic memory. After all, the first deciders were just “slaves,” right?
When the 2013 Virginia panel’s Q&A began (time 59:00 in the discussion’s video), I asked:
I've often heard historians, including President Ayers, say that during the sesquicentennial we need to develop a better understanding of how it was Black people themselves, unprompted by abolitionists or white politicians or generals, who pressed President Lincoln and history itself towards emancipation. Is the sesquicentennial doing that about our understanding, and how will this question be answered 50 years from now?
President Ayers replied, “No, the Republicans knew from the beginning what they were going to do, and it pretty much unfolded.” He attributed that interpretation to James Oakes and called it necessary for seeing “what really drove emancipation.” Andrew Delbanco, reviewing Oakes's The Scorpion's Sting, has distilled the interpretation:
First, slavery would be banned from territories. ... Republicans also planned to obstruct enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, and thereby to encourage slaves to flee to freedom. ... Abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia [would mean] freedom would be brought to the doorstep of the South. ... Finally, Oakes cites Republican determination to hunt down and prosecute slave traders ... . By these cumulative steps slavery would be surrounded by a “cordon of freedom.” … Forced suicide was the denouement of the plan.
But Delbanco saw improbability in the plan. Ira Berlin, of the University of Maryland's Freedmen and Southern Society Project, was more blunt in his review: “So much for the theory and the best hopes of the antebellum Republicans. Once the war began, emancipation took a different course. Slaves set the process in motion.”
Set the process in motion? Not if you ask Guelzo. He has written frequently for Claremont Review of Books at the conservative Claremont Institute, which calls him a senior fellow. There he wrote that Blight “frankly doubts whether Lincoln deserves much credit as the Emancipator,” then quoted Blight: “Numerous books and some slave narratives have demonstrated that slaves' volition in this story [of emancipation] is more than worthy of our attention.” Guelzo continued:
Blight thus pledges himself to the "self-emancipation thesis," in which slaves themselves used the exigencies of the Civil War as opportunities to free themselves, running away to safety and liberty with the advancing Union army long before Massa Linkum ever got around to picking up his emancipating pen. The great problem with the self-emancipation thesis (which first received public currency not from serious academic research but from the Ken Burns PBS Civil War series) is the simple lack of evidence that any such mass “self-emancipation” took place. The thesis may serve the noble purpose of promoting “black agency” and African-American self-esteem. But neither Blight nor the authors of “numerous books” have ever yet produced a single statistic on the number of slaves who thus freed themselves without benefit of Lincoln, nor has Blight ever dealt with the singular fact that, absent Lincoln's proclamation, not a single fugitive slave would ever be other than a fugitive, rather than a legally free man.
Elsewhere at Claremont, Guelzo has criticized what he called a “Marxist conceit still on the upswing in popularity, the idea of slave self-emancipation.” Lincoln scholar Guelzo strongly opposes what he sees as deplorable Lincoln iconoclasm built into the self-emancipation thesis. His February 2019 Wall Street Journal op-ed “Emancipation Deniers Target Lincoln’s Reputation” condemned the concept without using the two-word term and ended by calling emancipation “the most heroic deed any president has ever done.”
That’s a denial of the consequentiality of Civil War Black agency—a two-word phrase that, in a Guelzo essay from as late as 2016, was enclosed three times in insinuating quotation marks. Yet in one important way, even Guelzo not only sees, but emphasizes, a crucial place for Black agency in the Civil War’s transformation from a war for union to a war for union and freedom. He has acknowledged that, given the Union’s huge numbers of Black Civil War soldiers and sailors, it would be “smarmy” to assume “that the slaves were simply inert all during the war.”
In the section "A Story too Long in the Shadows" in the introduction to I Freed Myself, Williams notes that in a
1928 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, W. E. Woodward expressed white America's prevailing view that “negroes are the only people in the history of the world ... that ever became free without any effort of their own. … They twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals, and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres of land and a mule.”
“Sadly,” says Williams about that, “the public's general view of Blacks during the Civil War has changed little despite decades of scholarly attention.”