Freedom Volume 1 Series 1 The Destruction Of Slavery

Contains primary source material.

This volume presents a documentary record of the transformation of the Civil War into a war against slavery, & the slaves' role in their own emancipation.

A sweeping history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and its central role in abolishing slavery in the American South.

This is the first of a series of documentary histories of emancipation designed to tell the story of the transit of black people from slavery to freedom in the United States. The series will provide a social history of emancipation, written in the words of the emancipated. This volume explains how black military service helped to destroy slavery, and how the experience of soldiering shaped the life of black people (in the army and out) during and after the war; it also provides a social history of black soldiers.

This 1993 volume of Freedom presents a history of the emergence of free-labor relations in different settings in the Upper South.

Ira Berlin offers a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Emancipation was not an occasion but a century-long process of brutal struggle by generations of African Americans who were not naive about the price of freedom. Just as slavery was initiated and maintained by violence, undoing slavery also required violence.

As slavery collapsed during the American Civil War, former slaves struggled to secure their liberty, reconstitute their families, and create the institutions befitting a free people. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in different settings in the Upper South. At first, most federal officials hoped to mobilize former slaves without either transforming the conflict into a war of liberation or assuming responsibility for the young, the old, or others not suitable for military employment. But as the Union army came to depend on black workers and as the number of destitute freedpeople mounted, authorities at all levels grappled with intertwined questions of freedom, labor and welfare. Meanwhile, the former slaves pursued their own objectives, working within the constraints imposed by the war and Union occupation to fashion new lives as free people. The Civil War sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume of Freedom documents an important chapter in that contest.