A little longer than a newspaper op-ed. Posted during Thanksgiving, 2023.
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving slavery escapees.
But not yet. Though the story backs most sides in the history wars, it’s little known.
Almost no historian denies that the Black freedom strivers figured in emancipation’s evolution. Yet most Americans assume that once President Lincoln, the Army, and the Navy began making emancipation possible, white politicians alone delivered it.
And even where the story is known, it’s misframed as just another battle in the history wars—an argument over the extent to which the slavery escapees did or didn’t influence or force emancipation in the grotesque, filthy realm of the laws of slavery.
Yet way more important is those multitudes’ enterprising affirmation-by-action of the laws of nature and of nature’s god.
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Two contrasting journalistic essays from Juneteenth 2020 show how things stand:
Jamelle Bouie’s June 19, 2020, New York Times column “Why Juneteenth Matters,” which declares, “Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.” (Gift link.)
Dan McLaughlin’s June 25, 2020, National Review rebuttal: “Yes, Lincoln and the Union Freed the Slaves.” Online, the essay carries the subheadline “Jamelle Bouie mounts a dishonest effort to rewrite history.”
Historians’ views vary too. Among scholars, I Freed Myself, David Williams’s 2014 Cambridge University Press study of what some historians call self-emancipation, might best represent the Bouie extreme. Williams says, “The Emancipation Proclamation may have been signed with Lincoln’s pen, but blacks were its author.”
McLaughlin’s extreme might be best represented among historians by Allen C. Guelzo’s 2016 Claremont Review of Books essay “Up From Slavery: Did the American slaves liberate themselves?” At Princeton as a three-time winner of historians’ Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, Guelzo brings scholarly heft to his adamant dismissal of what James M. McPherson sees as a “self-emancipation thesis” that during the 1980s came to dominate scholarly understanding of emancipation’s Civil War political evolution. The increasingly controversial Claremont Institute illustrated Guelzo’s essay with this obvious send-up* of the Williams book’s cover:
Bouie and McLaughlin are both right—I think Bouie more than McLaughlin.
And they’re both wrong—I think McLaughlin more than Bouie. That’s especially given McLaughlin’s obliviousness to the hiding-in-plain-sight main thing: those escapees’ vote-with-their-feet devastation of American slavery’s depraved racial assumptions—their historic affirmation of the founding principles’ universality.
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Consider David Blight, the Frederick Douglass biographer who directs Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He once told the New York Times 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.”
How many thousands? McLaughlin acknowledges only that “Bouie notes, correctly, that once the war began, many slaves fled to the Union lines, and that this pressed the question of emancipation to the Union’s leaders.”
“Many”?
Princeton’s Sean Wilentz says “hundreds of thousands”:
Over the last forty years, historians of the Civil War era have illuminated how enslaved blacks helped bring about the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and then, two years later, the abolition of slavery. Building on W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconoclastic Black Reconstruction in America, first published in 1935, these studies have described how hundreds of thousands of slaves flocked to Union Army lines, dramatizing and then forcing the issue of freedom, which helped change a war to crush southern secession into a war to destroy slavery.
McPherson has pointed especially to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. Harding extolled the “daring, courageous activities of hundreds of thousands of black people ... setting themselves free.”
According to Brent Leggs, African American heritage director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the “freedom seekers” numbered fully 500,000.** He calls this the “unknown story” of a “catalyst for emancipation” and an example of “uplift” that positions Black Americans “not just as spectators in history,” but as actors in it.
Actors indeed. It’s important to recall that 200,000 Black Americans, some already free when the war started and some who escaped from slavery after Fort Sumter, served in uniform—about 180,000 in the Army and 20,000 in the Navy.
It all calls to mind Chinese human-rights activist Liu Xiobao’s Nobel Prize speech assertion that “no force ... can put an end to the human quest for freedom.” One by one, with no politicians or white abolitionists whispering “Freedom!” in their ears, but acting with self-agency under the laws of nature and of nature’s god, multitudes of self-emancipating Civil War slavery escapees stood up for themselves, in effect also standing up for those first principles of the founding.
All across the South, they challenged the United States finally to begin living up to those principles, however haltingly and imperfectly. Strong-adverb alert: They gloriously validated universal natural-rights claims from more than four score years earlier.
That’s why, whatever is said about emancipation politics in that filthy, grotesque legal realm, nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving slavery escapees.
But not yet.***