African American Review

The three books reviewed here reflect a powerful change over the past thirty years in Civil War historiography concerning the "freedom paradigm." [End Page 154] As surveyed in the Introduction to the concise and fascinating collection, Beyond Freedom, the meaning of emancipation has been a fraught term since the early twentieth century. Some historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, typically influenced by the Dunning school (named after William Archibald Dunning, 1857-1922), described emancipation as a disaster, characterizing the government's Reconstruction efforts as misguided and badly informed. The Dunning school also perpetuated the idea that the newly freed slaves were fundamentally ignorant and passive. Other historians, however, engaged in the recovery of black social agency successfully challenged this verdict. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) passionately illustrated that African Americans worked toward freedom and were not simply the helpless wards of governmental assistance. Fifty years later, Eric Foner's landmark 1988 work, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, defined Reconstruction in terms of the aspirations toward different and contested modes of freedom, resituating African American agency in more complex contexts than simply black-white relations. (I remember reading Foner's book in the early 1990s, awestruck at his ability to clear away the decades of prejudice that clouded his topic to that point.)

For the editors of Beyond Freedom and their colleagues who presented at the 2011 Gilder Lehrman conference on Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, there are still problems with a focus on freedoms. As the conference collection makes clear, rhetorics of "freedom" are complicated and undermined by understanding the simultaneous motives of global imperialism, gender dynamics, national economics, and relations of local dependence and coercion. The cynical expression "free to be exploited" comes to mind. Beyond Freedom looks carefully at many aspects of "freedom" that get missed with a triumphalist focus on the term.

For many undergraduates and novices to the field of African American history or the Reconstruction period, freedom seems like a pretty intuitive thing to grasp, and as a result, this revisionary history-work might initially seem puzzling. With titles like Beyond Freedom, Embattled Freedom, and Illusions of Emancipation, the books surveyed here seem pretty skeptical about the simple goodness of freedom. Why? In many ways, they reflect a contemporary pessimism about our own historical moment. Slavery ended over 150 years ago in the United States, and yet African Americans still face severe challenges to social equity as well as racism. As Harriet Jacobs poignantly asked after describing the depressing aspects of a poor black section of Washington, D.C. after the Civil War, "Is this freedom?" (Blight and Downs 1). These books attempt to open up historical explanations for how we got here.

Beyond Freedom cogently establishes the theoretical base of all three books, illustrating such paradoxes as the way in which the emancipation from slavery was reframed in negative ways to justify national segregation and international imperialism. The principal value of this collection is found in its broad scope, including its discursive analyses of the rhetoric of emancipation (Richard Newman); the consequences of emancipation for creating new relationships to state power (Chandra Manning); the difference between equity and emancipation (Kate Masur); and the interpretive dangers posed by the archive of the Freedmen's Bureau, which provided the basis for much progressive social history of the twentieth century (Jim Downs).

Jim Downs's essay on the subtle effects of...