The Washington Post - Howell Raines
Was Lincoln really a "Reluctant Emancipator," as Greeley and many historians since his day have insisted?…In Freedom National, historian James Oakes answers that question eloquently and, in the judgment of this amateur student of the Civil War, fully. Oakes argues that Lincoln, from the moment of his inauguration, began using every political and military means at his disposal to wipe out slavery forever…[Oakes's] argument that emancipation was a process, not the result of a single document, produces some helpful distinctions and benchmarks.
Publishers Weekly
Eliminating slavery proved harder “than anyone first imagined,” writes Oakes (The Radical and the Republican), professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, in this richly satisfying account. Ironically, the Constitution was “one of the most formidable obstacles to abolition—”enlightenment economics taught that slavery would eventually disappear, so the Founding Fathers felt little was lost in placating southern states by writing protections into the document. As deferent to the Constitution as their opponents, Republicans never supported abolishing slavery where it was legal, and though Lincoln maintained “that he would take no stance that went against his party,” Southern states saw the election of 1860 as a harbinger of abolition. It was, however, a slow process: by war’s end a mere 15% of four million slaves were free. Congressman James Wilson remarked, “slavery was a ‘condemned’ but ‘unexecuted culprit.’” Only with the 1865 ratification of the 13th Amendment were all slaves freed, “everywhere, for all future time.” Both a refreshing take on a moment in history and a primer on the political process, Oakes’s study is thoroughly absorbing. Maps & illus. (Dec.)
Robert I. Girardi - Washington Independent Review of Books
A masterful piece of scholarship.... A must-read book for anyone seeking a greater understanding of the complicated and politically charged nature of emancipation.
Eric Foner
This remarkable book offers the best account ever written of the complex historical process known as emancipation. The story is dramatic and compelling, and no one interested in the American Civil War or the fate of slavery can afford to ignore it.
Library Journal
Lincoln Prize-winner Oakes argues that the Civil War was fought not to preserve the Union (the standard line) but primarily to end slavery; he also chronicles the immediate consequences of emancipation. See David Von Drehle's just-published Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year for a different approach to the subject.
Kirkus Reviews
A finely argued book about how the destruction of slavery involved much more than Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Oakes (History/CUNY Graduate Center; The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, 2007, etc.) returns to the notion that slavery, rather than states' rights or "an outbreak of hysteria, irrationality and paranoia," was truly the origin of the Civil War. In order to challenge the Constitutional consensus on slavery, the anti-slavery activists had to appeal to the broad principles of "natural law," to which the Framers had implicitly referred. Also, opponents of slavery had to make the convincing argument that slaves were in fact not property, using the Somersett case in England as a legal benchmark. In addition to the Emancipation Proclamation, Oakes reveals the many smaller but significant victories for the opponents of slavery--e.g., New York's 1799 emancipation law and John Quincy Adams' eloquent defense of the slave ship Amistad's rebels before the Supreme Court. Proponents of the Liberty Party asserted that slavery was not a national institution, but peculiar to certain states and suitable to be "cordoned off," thus underscoring the importance of the border states during the Civil War as "containment" of the slave contagion; on the other hand, freedom, they believed, was national and not able to be restricted locally. Oakes wades through extremely nuanced arguments that evolved over time in the North and South, in Congress, in the military and in the mind of Lincoln. However, only 13 percent of the 4 million slaves living in the South were freed by the end of the war, prompting the necessity for a 13th Amendment to ensure Southern tractability. A useful contribution to the literature about slavery and the Civil War.
