Why "The Self-Emancipator"?

Engaging Civil War self-emancipators’ puzzlingly scanted place in national memory. (442 words. No paywall.)

Juneteenth, 2023. Posted from near Fort Monroe at Point Comfort, Virginia, where British North American slavery began in 1619, and where—thanks to enterprising slavery escapees—U.S. slavery began to crumble in 1861.

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Who freed enslaved Americans? Once the Army and Navy—with 200,000 Black members—began making emancipation possible, was it President Lincoln alone? Congress, by amending the Constitution?

Historians increasingly credit Black Americans themselves. To what extent did some half million wartime slavery escapees force slavery’s fate onto the American political agenda?

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The Substack name The Self-Emancipator recalls the antebellum abolitionist publication The Emancipator, now being reimagined in Boston “with a focus on explaining and identifying solutions to structural racism.”

The Self-Emancipator has a different focus.

That focus should appeal to all sides in the history wars. It’s seen in the title of the 2011 New York Times Magazine article “How Slavery Really Ended in America”—the subject of the forthcoming second posting.

In 2005, the Army announced the 2011 retirement of antebellum Fort Monroe, which contains a majestic, moated stone citadel—Freedom’s Fortress, self-emancipators called it.

For 18 years I’ve been advocating a sensible, history-respecting future for the retired post. In that time, I’ve learned something big. The country doesn’t yet generally see what increasing numbers of historians see: Black agency’s centrality in emancipation’s Civil War political evolution.

James M. McPherson wrote in 2008 that among scholars during the 1980s, a “self-emancipation thesis became dominant” for explaining that evolution—and that it “won the imprimatur of the foremost scholarly enterprise on the history of emancipation,” Ira Berlin’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project.

McPherson pointed especially to Vincent Harding’s 1981 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.”

In line with the self-emancipation thesis, Adam Goodheart, author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening, used Fort Monroe’s 1861 freedom story as the foundation for that 2011 Times article.

Yet a survey of well-intentioned and otherwise worthy Juneteenth media this week illustrates the pervasive obliviousness to how slavery really ended in America.

It’s often said, with a nationally inward look, that history matters for national self-understanding. But there’s also this: with freedom always imperiled or denied somewhere, the smart, enterprising initiative, grit, and gumption of the Civil War self-emancipation movement illuminates what multiracial America has struggled to achieve. The first nation founded on human-rights ideas, albeit highly imperfectly, has a quarter-millennium-long American emancipation story—a freedom story—to tell the world.

This Substack will advocate that story by surveying self-emancipation’s place in evolving national memory.

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