After Slavery

When the American Civil War ended in the spring of 1865, it was clear that slavery – at least in the legalized form it had taken up until then – would also end. Enslaved women and men had done much of the work already, freeing themselves by the thousands under the cover of war. By early 1865, the federal Congress took its own steps to end the practice of what David Brion Davis recently called "inhuman bondage," passing the Thirteenth Amendment and sending it out to the states for ratification. After the end of armed conflict, soldiers with the occupying forces of the Union army and agents of the newly organized Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands fanned out across the former Confederacy to enforce emancipation. Though pockets of bondage would persist into the fall, particularly in more remote and inaccessible communities, legalized bondage gradually dissolved: pushed into oblivion by black workers, by Union officials, and by the nation at large when, in December, its representatives ratified the Thirteenth Amendment.

Black troops lead Emancipation Day Celebration, Edisto Island
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated

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Yet just as the end of the Civil War must not be confused with the end of slavery, emancipation did not automatically imbue freedom with meaning. It would take many people many weeks to enforce emancipation. It would take many more people a good deal longer to work out the terms of freedom. It was an intense and sometimes deadly conflict, a struggle that David Swain, a former governor of North Carolina, considered a new war, and with good reason. Former Confederates and former slaveholders had their own ideas about how a post-slavery world ought to be organized, and who would have what kind of power on what terms. So too did Northern leaders, liberators, soldiers, and the thousands of Yankee teachers and entrepreneurs who saw in the former Confederacy a place to be subdued, transformed, and revived along free-labor lines. Hardly mute or inert bystanders, former slaves – men and women alike – also nourished their own expectations and dreams about freedom. Indeed, one can easily argue that as the most recently unfree, the four million people who had been liberated by war had the greatest stakes in this debate. It would be wrong, too, to conceptualize this debate in terms of these three categories of actors. White Southerners disagreed, sometimes violently, about the future of their region, its polity, and its productive system. Northerners embraced nearly as many understandings of freedom and free labor as there were people to articulate ideas. Women often projected ideas about freedom that conflicted with men’s. Rich people’s aspirations were not always shared by the poor. Farmers expected something different than did urban entrepreneurs. Former slaves also disagreed, and fault lines quickly appeared among them as black women and men considered what sort of social, political, and economic order ought to replace the now thoroughly discredited system of slavery.

The documents in this unit provide just a small sample of the range and complexity of an intense debate that would rock the nation for decades to come: what was freedom, who had the right to decide, and what did it mean for whom on a day-to-day basis? These materials can be profitably examined alone and on their own merits. Deeper understanding about this “war,” one that arguably continues to this day, can be obtained by approaching the documents together, and in chronological order. It is then that the dynamic quality of what was an intense debate becomes the most visible.