Illusions of Emancipation

March 1, 2019

Reidy (From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South) draws on the massive set of documents related to emancipation, black soldiering, Reconstruction, and related issues in the National Archives to bring us into the intimate worlds of people working out the meanings of "freedom" during the Civil War era. The author's insightful study of the many complex, contradictory, and contentious ideas about and engagements with fighting for or against black freedom shows that experience counted more than ideology, practice more than promise, in determining the scope and scale of equality. By his reckoning, blacks drove and thus in critical ways defined the issues through such actions as throwing off bondage, fighting for the Union, creating their own institutions, and working to gain property. One conclusion that comes from Reidy's telling and compelling accounts is the persistence black Americans used to claim and stake out freedom, however incomplete, on their terms. VERDICT Reidy's important book shows that the movement toward freedom was neither linear nor inevitable but was and must be constant. In that, he speaks to not only history but our own day.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

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