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Overview
In this succinct study, Edna Greene Medford examines the ideas and events that shaped President Lincoln’s responses to slavery, following the arc of his ideological development from the beginning of the Civil War, when he aimed to pursue a course of noninterference, to his championing of slavery’s destruction before the conflict ended. Throughout, Medford juxtaposes the president’s motivations for advocating freedom with the aspirations of African Americans themselves, restoring African Americans to the center of the story about the struggle for their own liberation.
Lincoln and African Americans, Medford argues, approached emancipation differently, with the president moving slowly and cautiously in order to save the Union while the enslaved and their supporters pressed more urgently for an end to slavery. Despite the differences, an undeclared partnership existed between the president and slaves that led to both preservation of the Union and freedom for those in bondage. Medford chronicles Lincoln’s transition from advocating gradual abolition to campaigning for immediate emancipation for the majority of the enslaved, a change effected by the military and by the efforts of African Americans. The author argues that many players—including the abolitionists and Radical Republicans, War Democrats, and black men and women—participated in the drama through agitation, military support of the Union, and destruction of the institution from within. Medford also addresses differences in the interpretation of freedom: Lincoln and most Americans defined it as the destruction of slavery, but African Americans understood the term to involve equality and full inclusion into American society. An epilogue considers Lincoln’s death, African American efforts to honor him, and the president’s legacy at home and abroad.
Both enslaved and free black people, Medford demonstrates, were fervent participants in the emancipation effort, showing an eagerness to get on with the business of freedom long before the president or the North did. By including African American voices in the emancipation narrative, this insightful volume offers a fresh and welcome perspective on Lincoln’s America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780809333646 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Southern Illinois University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/12/2015 |
| Series: | Concise Lincoln Library |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 141 |
| Sales rank: | 730,702 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Edna Greene Medford is a professor of history and the associate provost for faculty affairs at Howard University. She is a coauthor, with Frank J. Williams and Harold Holzer, of The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views.
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION The year 1800 and the decade following foreshadowed the struggle over slavery that would eventually engulf the nation by midcentury. On August 30, Gabriel, the human property of Thomas Prosser of Henrico County, Virginia, attempted to strike out against nearly two centuries of racial injustice and inhumanity by gathering in rebellion a thousand or more enslaved people from the countryside surrounding Richmond. Of imposing stature at nearly six feet, three inches tall, the literate blacksmith had come to the attention of the courts because of his fight with a white overseer a year earlier. Gabriel had been convicted of maiming (he had bitten off most of the overseer’s ear), a capital offense. His sentence was commuted to burning in the hand, but the punishment meted out for this violation of Virginia laws had not subdued him. Gabriel’s revolt had been meticulously planned. The men would arm themselves with swords made from scythes and with weapons seized from the arsenal. They would take hostages (including Governor James Monroe, the future president of a nation that was then just over two decades old) and attack Richmond. But in the end, this would-be army of liberation was stayed by the unpredictability of nature—torrential rains hindered access to the city arsenal—and by the treachery of two of Gabriel’s compatriots. After escaping to Norfolk, the audacious slave was captured, tried, convicted, and executed, the fate reserved for all who dared to employ violence in defense of black freedom. More than two dozen of his fellow conspirators shared his destiny. One of them, likening his actions to that of the American colonists in the Revolution, declared that he had “nothing more to offer than what general Washington would have had to offer had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my country men and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.” Bracketing Gabriel’s attempted revolt was the birth of two men, one a white man who believed God had called him to liberate those held in bondage and the other an enslaved man. Born in May, John Brown would spend much of his adult life fighting for the freedom of a people with whom his only connection was a shared humanity. The brutality of his tactics against supporters of slavery and his uncompromising commitment to freedom led men and women in his own time to question his sanity. His mental stability remains a source of interest and debate even today. Later in the year, Nat, the property of Benjamin Turner of Southampton County, Virginia, drew his first breath. Encouraged in the belief by those around him (black and white) that he was special, the boy grew into manhood certain, like John Brown, that God had created him for some great purpose. By the time he was thirty-one, the literate preacher had garnered as much respect from his presumed superiors as was possible for an enslaved person. But Nat had no interest in seeking the favor of white men. After receiving what he believed to be God’s plan for him through a series of visions, he would take his turn as liberator of his people. On August 22 and 23, 1831, he led a small band in rebellion through Southside Virginia before the alarmed community rallied to quash his attack. Captured after two months in hiding, he met his death at the hands of state officials who considered him property but nevertheless held him accountable for his actions. Dozens more, many of them totally in-nocent of any crime, met their end at the hands of white vigilantes overcome with fear and the realization that all was not well with their enslaved laborers. In a sense, Denmark Vesey was “born” in 1800 as well. That year the former slave had purchased his freedom using funds he had won earlier in the South Carolina lottery. His industriousness and skill at carpentry afforded him a comfortable life, but he suffered the inhumanity of separation from family members who remained in slavery. Twenty-two years after he had secured his own freedom, he would plan a revolt that would have been the largest in the history of the nation, had the plot not been uncovered beforehand. Born within a decade of this watershed year, Abraham Lincoln represented a different kind of defender of freedom, one who eschewed violence but, ironically, would help to destroy slavery by militarily defending the American Union. Lincoln followed a less urgent and more detached path than the revolutionaries. While he saw advantage in gradual and peaceful abolition, the war escalated his timetable and altered his approach. Understanding the man who would be credited with freeing the slaves requires the separation of myth from reality, a task not so easily achieved when dealing with Lincoln. A century and a half after his death, he remains an enigma, not fully understood even by those who think they know him best. Thousands of books have addressed every conceivable aspect of his life, yet his motivations and actions in the effort to end slavery remain contested ground. The sesquicentennial observance of the issuing of his Emancipation Proclamation has only heightened our interest and has encouraged reassessments of the “central act” of his administration. Hence, the last decade has witnessed the publication of several volumes that view him from intriguing, and often provocative, perspectives. Books depict Lincoln committed to ending slavery from early on in the war and being able to succeed by prudently negotiating the challenges he faced from Peace Democrats, both conservative and radical members of his own party, border state representatives, and constraints placed on him by the Constitution. Other works discuss his evolving views about international laws of war and how they might have provided a legal framework for emancipation. And in a movement away from the traditional focus on Lincoln as the sole architect of emancipation, his actions are presented as a continuation of a larger Republican strategy, which had originated and developed from the party’s antislavery policies that predated the war. Viewed through this lens, southern suspicions of a Republican president were justified. These works, and others, have contributed immeasurably to the discourse surrounding slavery, emancipation, and Lincoln’s role in America’s struggle with its own principles in the mid-nineteenth century.8 While this volume takes a traditional approach to interpreting the destruction of slavery—it is grounded in the notion that union was indeed paramount in the president’s thinking and that slavery’s demise (whether by military or by state action) resulted as a consequence of war—its primary aim is to broaden the emancipation narrative. While Lincoln remains central to the story, it argues for the inclusion of many players in the drama—among them, the abolitionists and Radical Republicans, War Democrats, and others (including the Gabriels, Veseys, Nats, and John Browns) who pushed America to complete the transition begun by those who had championed liberty in 1776. To this end, the volume seeks to restore African Americans to their rightful place in the struggle for their own liberation. The historiography is rather uneven in regard to how emancipation studies choose to depict the beneficiaries of freedom, with extremes that either suggest they made minor contributions to their liberation or argue for the primacy of self-emancipation. An alternative way of viewing emancipation, perhaps, is that the president and the seekers of freedom constituted an informal, if sometimes strained, alliance based on the self-interest of both. Lincoln was not a protector of slavery, but neither were enslaved men and women peripheral to the process; they were much more than a “species of property” waiting patiently to be transformed into human beings by presidential decree. By acting in their own self-interest, African Americans facilitated Lincoln’s emancipation plans and sometimes extended them. They were fervent, impatient participants in the emancipation effort, showing an eagerness to get on with the business of freedom long before the rest of the country had embraced their cause. But in the end, their goal merged with Lincoln’s, and together they achieved in deed the liberty that Americans had heretofore championed in word. [end of excerpt]
Table of Contents
ContentsIntroduction
1 The Man and His Times
2 The 1860 Election and the Loss of Union
3 War, Union, and Slavery
4 Emancipation by Presidential Decree
5 To Know Freedom
6 Ending Slavery Forever
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index 135
Gallery of illustrations following page 60