What is Emancipation?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:01

On New Year's Day,: 1863

Not Gettysburg, but the Emancipation Proclamation, where he declared that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious areas are and henceforth shall be, free. This pivotal moment in the Civil War and in the future course of civil equality in the US has been celebrated and immortalized in history by.

But what does it actually mean? What were the implications and what really changed? In this episode, I'm going to find out what is emancipation? Welcome to America, a history podcast.

I'm Liam Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA what it is today.

To discuss this, I am joined by an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University and the author of Somewhere Toward Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation, which we'll link to in the show notes as well, for anyone that's interested. Welcome to the show, Bennett Parton.

Bennett Parten: 00:01:25

Thanks. Thanks, Liam. Thanks for having me.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:27

Really, really great to have you on the show.

And, you know, before I hit record, I was just saying how it's one of those subjects that we touch on a lot when we talk about slavery and the Civil War and any issues really around sort of the history of civil rights. But I feel like it's just not something that we really understand as much as we should.

So, firstly, just to kick us off, I'm hoping you can provide just a little bit of clarity on what emancipation actually means.

Bennett Parten: 00:01:53

Sure, yeah. I'm happy to do so. And definitionally, emancipation simply means to liberate oneself, to free oneself, or to have been freed. Right. It is the act.

Right. Of liberation. And in the US, Emancipation comes in the middle of the Civil War and it evolves in stages over the course of the war.

Starts in: 1861

at is updated a year later in: 1862

But then that is updated again, as you said, with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which frees enslaved people who live in the States in rebellion, that is the Confederacy.

ee it evolving in stages from: 1861

So we can see contextually, emancipation is something that unfolds in stages over the Civil War as the war itself evolves. Now, as to what freedom means, that is a much more complicated question. As I'm sure the listeners will know.

Freedom is much more of an abstract concept. But I think that's a really good place to start when it comes to thinking about what emancipation actually meant for those experiencing it.

The reality is what freedom meant in the Civil War was something that was completely ill defined, undefined.

And one of the processes for both the US Government as well as for enslaved people who are now free people, is coming to some sort of determination of what freedom will actually mean.

And that is really the task that is in front of the US as the war is unfolding, and especially in the early days of Reconstruction, which is the term we use to describe the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Liam Heffernan: 00:04:27

Yeah, and I think that's a really important distinction that you touched on it. It makes me think of the Office.

I don't know if you're a fan of the Office, but the scene where Michael Scott kind of thinks that declaring bankruptcy is just a case of like walking into the office and saying, I declare bankruptcy. Yeah, right.

I feel like emancipation sort of has that sort of similar vibe to it where just because Lincoln said, I'm emancipating the slaves, there's this assumption that from that point, you know, slaves were free and everyone was happy. And there's just. There was a whole effort beyond that to actually make that a reality. Right?

Bennett Parten: 00:05:01

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, trying to make freedom mean something more than simply being the opposite of slavery is the great social and political question that the US has to confront. And this takes place, as I said, in the waning days of the Civil War.

There are all sorts of government bodies, policymakers, activists, thinkers, who are already imagining what a post war America could look like and how freedom could mean something more than just simply being the opposite of slavery. And then again, this becomes the key question of Reconstruction.

It's partly why we have the 14th and 15th amendment, which along with the 13th amendment are known as the Reconstruction Amendments, and in their own unique ways, completely revolutionize American life.

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:52

Yeah, and we'll get onto, I guess, those longer term implications in a minute, but I'm really hoping you can tell me A little bit about your book first, because that really focuses on Sherman's march and sort of the events around the Civil War, doesn't it?

Bennett Parten: 00:06:07

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So my book is about a period or a campaign in the Civil War that's known as Sherman's March, sometimes known as Sherman's March to the Sea.

ch that begins in November of: 1864

paign over the long summer of: 1864

He will burn its military or its. Its industries. Right.

Anything that could be of military use to the Confederacy, which will lead to a huge conflagration in the city that will ultimately see large chunks of Atlanta burned to the ground.

nah right around Christmas of: 1864

And this has long been a controversial moment in the Civil War or a famous moment, in part because it is a campaign that truly takes the war to the heart of the Confederacy.

And one of the things that Sherman did was when he moved out of Atlanta, he cut his supply lines and ordered his men to forage off the farms in the fields of Georgia, both to sustain themselves, but also to target the emotional and material wherewithal of Southerners to withstand the fight.

This has given all sorts or birth to all sorts of arguments that this was the moment that births total war, modern warfare, the kind of strategies we'll see later in the 20th century and the first and Second World War, Vietnam, other conflicts. It's also birthed real grievances on the part of white Southerners who look at Sherman as a bit of a war criminal.

All that sort of stuff is a little bit over exaggerated, but nonetheless, that's typically how we have remembered this moment. But what my book does is it shows that this is also likely America's largest emancipation event.

Because the fact is, when Sherman moves out of Atlanta and begins marching through Georgia, enslaved people will begin moving and running to the army, imagining the army as an army of liberation from the very beginning.

self only had a population in: 1860

That's the size of what was then Georgia's largest city and one of the largest cities in the South. This is a massive movement of people who, again, are all running to the army in search of freedom.

And the title of my book, Somewhere Toward Freedom, I think, gets at this question of what did freedom really mean? Because it was completely ill defined. Right. What were these people marching toward?

Well, freedom wasn't clear, but they knew they were marching somewhere toward freedom. What that meant exactly was yet to be determined.

But most people, most freed people, in making this journey, recognized that this was a critical first step to it.

But the book, I think, is indicative of a larger story, which is that to really understand emancipation in US History and in the Civil War, we have to recognize is that all throughout the Civil War, all across the landscape of the Civil War, wherever the army was, enslaved people were always running to try to meet the army on the assumption that where the army was, freedom lied. Also, this happens from the very beginning. It will happen all the way from the very end.

And what we see in the course of the Civil War is a kind of push and pull interplay between what's happening in D.C. at the federal level, at the level of policy, and what's happening on the ground.

And we can see in some ways, enslaved people on the ground acting, the government reacting, the government initiating policies that only invite more enslaved people to run to the army. So we can really see this interplay between what's happening on the ground and what's happening in D.C.

at the federal and at the level of policymaking.

Liam Heffernan: 00:10:26

Yeah. And I think any kind of pathway towards emancipation and ultimately freedom that slaves had has to be seen as a positive.

However, I do wonder, you know, in reality, how it played out when you had emancipated black Americans fighting alongside white Americans.

And just because they were emancipated, I'm going to make the assumption here that they were by no means still treated as equals or regarded as equals in any sense, because racism was still very much alive. Right?

Bennett Parten: 00:11:01

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's absolutely the case.

And many of the Northerners who fought in the US army, who were tasked with overseeing emancipation and who were taking part right in these military camps in which enslaved people were running to and trying to escape for freedom carried many of the same racial views that white Southerners did. 19th century US was an incredibly racist time.

Americans in general had a variety of different racial views, and many of them clung by these views, which made life incredibly difficult for some of the enslaved people.

But it's also worth being said, too, that in some cases, seeing the links that enslaved people would go to to try to get to freedom, seeing how enslaved people consistently allied with the soldiers, this is one of the things that is very evident in my book. It's that all along Sherman's march through Georgia, enslaved people acted as intelligence agents, scouts. They allied with the soldiers.

They helped the soldiers. There's a great story about how when the soldiers arrive outside of Savannah, there's a lack of food.

They enter into the kind of rice swamps north of Savannah where rice production is most dominant. But Sherman's army is an army of midwesterners from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin.

If they've eaten rice before, they certainly don't know how to husk it with a mortar and pestle. The rice swamps north of Savannah is very different from the prairies of Illinois.

But enslaved people essentially feed them and sustain them by teaching them how to cook and prepare rice. Right.

So it's this experience of seeing and recognizing how central enslaved people were to the army's success, how they allied with them, they would begin to convince many Americans and many soldiers of. Of the need to embrace emancipation and will convince them of the need to target slavery as a consequence of this war.

And so, yes, absolutely, many of these soldiers kept their racial prejudices. And in fact, to go back to my book, the worst instance of this is a US army general named Jeff c. Davis. This is not the confederate president.

This is a different individual, but he is. Yeah, right. This is someone who wears his racial prejudice on his sleeve.

And he does not like the fact that enslaved people are following his army will actually begin a process whereby he'll begin pulling up bridges before the refugees can cross. And so really, the reaction runs. Runs the gamut. You have some who embrace emancipation, but you have some like this general Jeff c.

Davis, who holds on to their prejudices and acts upon it in the war as well.

Liam Heffernan: 00:13:51

With all of that in mind, I do wonder, and I realize I'm going to put a huge downer on this conversation, but was there something just really strategic about choosing to emancipate the slaves in terms of giving the Union the tactical advantage in the war? Because as you pointed out, there were clear benefits to having Emancipated slaves on side.

Bennett Parten: 00:14:18

Yeah, unquestionably.

I mean, Lincoln, his cabinet was fairly divided on the issue of emancipation, but nonetheless, there were real policymakers who were pressing the government to adopt more of an anti slavery position and to embrace emancipation itself. And Lincoln is someone who opposed slavery. He particularly opposed slavery's expansion into the western territories.

But he also recognized that he had very little power to actually legislate on slavery where it already existed, that is, in the South. So Lincoln always had to walk this sort of legal tightrope when it came to emancipation.

He also had to walk a tightrope in the sense that he was leery of presenting his administration as being too anti slavery, too abolitionist, and too eager to embrace emancipation out of fear that he might alienate those white Northern voters who were not prepared to fight a war to end slavery and who, quite frankly, didn't really see anti slavery as something that they should, the government, should support.

And so, because of this, Lincoln is always, always very careful and very clear to present emancipation as a policy that is aimed to ending the war and strengthening the war effort first and foremost.

,: 1863

And so this is Lincoln trying to show the US that he's thinking of emancipation as leverage. Right. To end the war.

And then to your point, absolutely, when the Emancipation Proclamation does go into effect, it serves as a real signal to enslave people to continue fleeing plantations, which will only weaken the Confederacy.

And then the Emancipation Proclamation also has a critical second provision that allows for the enlisting and raising of black troops for the very first time. And this will be a hugely transformative policy change. About 186,000 black men will serve in the U.S. army, which is a real boost to the U.S.

ritical stage in the war from: 1863

And we also have to recognize that there were real strategic and political implications as well.

Liam Heffernan: 00:16:58

Yeah. And I think it's really easy when we talk about the Civil War, to reduce it to a question of the racist south versus the abolitionist North.

But from previous conversations on this podcast, and from what I understand. Actually, there's a lot more nuance than that in that there were just because you lived in the north, it didn't make you pro abolition.

So I wonder what sort of resistance or pushback there was to even within the Union towards emancipation.

Bennett Parten: 00:17:29

Oh, there's significant pushback. I mean, Lincoln was a Republican and his Republican Party was dominant in Congress in the war.

And the Republican Party was a party itself that opposed the expansion of slavery into the West. That's not necessarily say that they opposed slavery in principle.

And many of them were quite worried about the legal ability of the US Government to actually pass legislation on slavery and to enact policy on slavery during the war. They end up doing so, but in doing so, they kind of pressed the bounds of congressional and federal power in the process.

But within the Republican Party there were extreme voices, moderate voices that Lincoln always had to contend with.

th, which was a party that by: 1864

d he'll run for reelection in: 1864

And this will partly be a referendum on whether the war should continue as is, or whether some form of peace should be sued with the South. And if that's the case, it's unclear whether or not emancipation would have ever been able to sort of complete its evolution. Right.

will win. But all throughout: 1864

north, sizable Democratic coalition that opposes this evolution in the war.

And so to your point about the framing of the anti slavery north or the abolitionist north versus the racist pro slavery south, we have to recognize there is real nuance right in that conversation.

And in some ways, I think saying the abolitionist north is also incorrect because we have to recognize that being an abolitionist means taking active steps to end slavery and opposing slavery and wanting to see it end immediately. The far more capacious category for folks is anti slavery opposing slavery. But people could oppose slavery for a variety of different reasons.

Most opposed the expansion of slavery into the West. This is what galvanizes Republicans. And so there is a real range of opinion in the US north throughout the Civil War.

Liam Heffernan: 00:20:12

Yeah. And it kind of brings us back to this point of just because someone was anti slavery, it didn't necessarily make them equality.

And I just, I wonder what the kind of, the implications really were of emancipation becoming law and the struggles then to, you know, turn that into something really meaningful for black Americans.

Bennett Parten: 00:20:38

Yeah, well, that's, this is the central question to come out of the Civil War, which is that, as you said, there is a range of opinion and certainly for someone can be anti slavery and not necessarily believe in racial equality, Lincoln included.

uns for Senate In Illinois in: 1858

He'll say that he does not believe in racial equality. And so he's a kind of case in point for the different positions that folks could take in this period.

But we fast forward to the end of the war because of emancipation. The US Government is nonetheless tasked with, as we said earlier, making freedom mean something, pursuing some form of equality.

This is where the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments come into place. These are the Reconstruction Amendments that completely change the nature of the U.S. constitution.

And they do so by ending slavery in the 13th Amendment.

In the 14th Amendment, which provides or defines American citizenship for the first time, it makes a way for universal male suffrage, including black male suffrage. It provides due process rights, equal protection rights.

And then the 15th Amendment comes after the 14th Amendment, and it is a bill that attempts to protect the right to vote for all Americans, but particularly for black Americans.

And so in Reconstruction, what we see is a real expansion of civil rights that are all about trying to protect freed people in freedom and, and trying to secure some form of equality under the law.

Liam Heffernan: 00:22:30

Yeah.

And I guess, you know, the, the, the, the consequences of that, which, you know, I think unanimously was necessary, is that you end up with this almost vigilantism in America.

You know, organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and, and, and, and other kind of racist organizations that, that feel like they need to step in and enforce some sort of, I don't know, like hostility against, you know, African Americans for where the law isn't. And I just, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't this easy fix, was it?

Bennett Parten: 00:23:03

No, not at all. I mean, Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War is a dark and bloody time in American history. It's an incredibly complicated time.

And it is complicated for a variety of reasons.

1 It asks all sorts of thorny political questions of how do states that have essentially dissolved their attachment to the US have seceded from the US Government? How do they then become reintegrated and readmitted into the Union? What do you do with those former constitution, state constitutions?

What do you do with the ex Confederates who had just launched insurrection? Do they have voting power? Who's going to lead these states? What is this process right of readmittance?

But then you also have this task of transitioning from a slave based cotton economy to, to some form of free labor economy. You know, cotton is the world's dominant raw material. It is was the oil right? Or what oil is in the 20th century is incredibly valuable.

What does a Southern economy look like without. Well, cotton is going to remain, but what does a cotton industry look like without slave labor?

And then two to the point we've been talking about, how do you begin to make sure that the policies enacted in Washington D.C.

as it relates to equality and the rights of freed people, how do you make sure that they are enforced on the ground in Reconstruction in the years after the Civil War? This is another really difficult problem.

And the answer initially is to have agencies, institutions and military, a military presence on the ground to oversee it. But as you mentioned, Southerners will fight back.

Southerners will do their best to roll back the gangs of the war and of Reconstruction and will often resort to vigilante violence through organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, but also engage in sporadic and other localized forms of violence as well to try to roll back these gains and to try to essentially wrest power in these states back into the hands of white Southerners from black Southerners and their allies in the North.

Liam Heffernan: 00:25:13

Thinking kind of about some of that, I wonder how transformative the act of emancipation is in itself and sort of all of those other mechanics that need to feed into that to actually create some sort of meaningful long term change.

Bennett Parten: 00:25:32

Yeah, well, this is a really great question.

This is one that American historians talk about question all the time and seemingly have been thinking about this a lot here recently because certainly emancipation changed everything. The 13th Amendment right outlaws slavery, end slavery.

For a nation like the US that had been a slave country since its founding, had been born in North American colonies that allowed slavery. Right. This is a huge change in its history. And to for enslaved people, this is a remarkable moment.

For the first time they have some ability to move, to marry. It is a real physical change and it matters immensely to their day to day lives.

But some historians have nonetheless taken a Longer view at this and have looked and have seen at the ways in which labor systems like sharecropping, convict leasing, how the perpetuation, the persistence of the plantation as an economic and productive unit. Well, by the end of the 19th century, approximate conditions that look a whole lot like slavery.

You add into this the unenforcement or the lack of enforcement of the fourteenth Amendment of civil rights.

You see, by the end of the 19th century, what emerges in the south is a system that is not slavery, but in a variety of different ways, looks a lot like or at least approximates some of the conditions of slavery itself. Other historians will take a different view and say, no, I mean, emancipation was truly a radical act that changed everything.

But other historians, as I said, will take this longer view and see how slavery is approximated. And so historians oftentimes debate back and forth what really changed in the South.

Was it a story of true change or is it a story of continuity, just in different forms? But I think that it is still worth while recognizing just how revolutionary the Civil war was.

The 13th Amendment was, abolition was, and emancipation was, because it truly, truly did redefine America and change conditions in the South.

Liam Heffernan: 00:27:45

Yeah, and I guess, you know, we can talk about, you know, the hundred plus years so of, you know, fights towards civil rights and what ultimately became the Civil Rights act, you know, following the Civil War. But of course, know without that significant pivot in announcing emancipation and the 13th Amendment, none of that could have happened, right?

Bennett Parten: 00:28:09

, there is a Civil Rights Act: 1866

It is the first such civil rights bill in American history.

ound in the south as early as: 1860

wanes over the course of the: 1870

mitment through things like a: 1971

civil rights movement in the: 1950

But as we're saying, right, that this period of reconstruction was a real period of civil rights in America, but what we see after is a walking back or walking away from the commitment to civil rights of that earlier period.

Liam Heffernan: 00:30:03

Yeah. And it's a really important point to make.

And of course, anyone that wants to find out more about emancipation or any of the events around that more broadly, I can't recommend your book enough. And we'll, we'll, we'll link that in the show notes for anyone that does want to read up more.

Thank you, Bennett, for joining me on this podcast as well. It's, it's been a real pleasure having you on to talk about this.

And I realize there's just so many offshoots of things that we can be discussing off the back of this, and hopefully we can get you back on the podcast sometime to do that.

Bennett Parten: 00:30:36

Yeah, no, I'd love to.

I mean, like I said, reconstruction is, I tell my students, we live in the world that Reconstruction created far more than the world that the American Revolution created, or at least the America that the American Revolution created. So it's hugely important. I'm happy to be here and talk about it.

Liam Heffernan: 00:30:53

Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's, it's really insightful.

And we're, we're going to actually stick around and do a quick bonus episode for anyone that does want to hear that and hear it a bit sooner. You can support the podcast from as little as a couple of dollars a month and you get early access to all of that.

Otherwise you just have to wait a week.

But, you know, if you do enjoy listening to this podcast, make sure you leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening to this as well, because it bumps us up the algorithm and more people find us, and that's really awesome. Additionally, if you do follow all the links in the show notes, you can support the show in various ways.

And we're going to leave some links to all of the stuff that we've mentioned as well, so that you can keep reading and researching about what we've discussed today. Thank you so much for listening, and goodbye.