The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States

by Ira Berlin

Overview

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women.

“Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States… The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.”
—Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674986558
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	11/05/2018
Series:	The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures , #14
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	593,975
Product dimensions:	4.38(w) x 7.12(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Ira Berlin was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Table of Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Near-Century-Long Demise of Slavery
Chapter 2. Sounding the Egalitarian Clarion
Chapter 3. The Bloody Struggle Endures
Coda: Free at Last
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

The cause of the end of slavery in the U.S. is a long, complex story that is usually, in the general reading public’s mind, simplified by ‘the Civil War ended it.’ In this remarkably cogent, impressively thought-out, and even beautifully styled account by a university historian, we are given emphatic witness to his long-held professional conviction that ‘freedom’s arrival,’ as he phrases it, was not due to a ‘moment or a man’ but because of a process that took a century to unfold.

Booklist (starred review) - Brad Hooper

A short, fast-paced interpretive history of the transition of African Americans from chattels to free persons. [Berlin] challenges previous scholars who identify both a ‘moment’ and a human factor that sparked emancipation—generally either President Abraham Lincoln or the South’s slaves—for initiating slavery’s overthrow. Instead, Berlin takes the long view in charting emancipation’s circuitous metamorphosis, from the late 18th century until the 1860s… In the end, Berlin credits black persons, north and south, for gradually but forcefully removing slavery’s stain from the fabric of American life.

Choice - J. D. Smith

Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States… The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.

Edward E. Baptist

The Long Emancipation…gives us an overview of abolitionism's history. Many readers will want additional information about the particular stories touched on in this book…But for others, the brief but knowledgeable survey that Berlin provides here will be all they require. The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists…Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.

The New York Times Book Review - Edward E. Baptist

07/20/2015
University of Maryland historian Berlin (Many Thousands Gone) has studied American slavery from its origins through its demise, and in this short, tightly constructed monograph he focuses on the latter process, which after a century and a half “remains very much alive among us and about us.” The work, based on his 2014 Nathan I. Huggins lectures in African-American history at Harvard, centers on whether emancipation came as the result of centuries of liberation struggles on the part of the enslaved, or if it was the gift of “constituted authority” on the part of Abraham Lincoln. That debate maps onto the wider issue of whether the majority of slaves were in constant, if often secret, forms of resistance to their bondage, or whether they accommodated themselves to their plight and hoped simply to ameliorate their situation. In Berlin’s view, “the demise of slavery was not so much a proclamation as a movement” that played out in various ways across the plantation societies of the Atlantic. All were characterized by black resistance, violent struggle, and a stated desire for freedom and citizenship. Writing for a general audience, Berlin lucidly illuminates the “near-century-long” process of abolition and how, in many ways, the work of emancipation continues today. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States… The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.
-- Edward E. Baptist New York Times Book Review

The cause of the end of slavery in the U.S. is a long, complex story that is usually, in the general reading public’s mind, simplified by ‘the Civil War ended it.’ In this remarkably cogent, impressively thought-out, and even beautifully styled account by a university historian, we are given emphatic witness to his long-held professional conviction that ‘freedom’s arrival,’ as he phrases it, was not due to a ‘moment or a man’ but because of a process that took a century to unfold.
-- Brad Hooper Booklist (starred review)

A short, fast-paced interpretive history of the transition of African Americans from chattels to free persons. [Berlin] challenges previous scholars who identify both a ‘moment’ and a human factor that sparked emancipation—generally either President Abraham Lincoln or the South’s slaves—for initiating slavery’s overthrow. Instead, Berlin takes the long view in charting emancipation’s circuitous metamorphosis, from the late 18th century until the 1860s… In the end, Berlin credits black persons, north and south, for gradually but forcefully removing slavery’s stain from the fabric of American life.
-- J. D. Smith Choice

Berlin lucidly illuminates the ‘near-century-long’ process of abolition and how, in many ways, the work of emancipation continues today.
-- Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher