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Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War

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This book, consisting of three robust essays written by a stellar team of British historians, is an exceedingly important book because it uses historical facts and the logic and structure of the social and military situations of the Civil War, to correct a very much distorted record of how, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the slaves were actually freed. And in the process it shines fresh light on American myths, legends and long held propaganda about the role whites, whether North or South, and including President Lincoln, played in freeing the slaves.

The upshot of the book is that it not only demystifies Emancipation, which in any case, was an "evolutionary process" rather than a single "discrete act," it also puts a lie to the accepted legend that American whites were so "freedom-loving" that they fought a war entirely to ensure the freedom of the slave. Despite the well-worn and accepted legend that it was "Lincoln who freed the slaves," the facts revealed in the first essay (as well as in the logic and reality of the social conditions surrounding the war revealed there) -- tell quite a different story. Together they strongly reinforce the idea that until the Thirteenth Amendment, the slaves were never actually "freed" at all but that they simply walked to freedom themselves as the institution of slavery simply crumbled all about them, and did so under the weight of the "fog" and "chaos" of the Civil War. The gates of freedom were simply blown off their hinges and sprung open because no one was available to close them. That is, no on was available to "mind the store," and as a result, the slaves, who did not hesitate to take advantage of this situation, simply scampered out into the fresh air called freedom. Thus they were not so much "granted" their freedom, as they were simply "released into the air where they could simply inhaled it." They were simply left to inhale it on their own accord entirely as an exigent byproduct of the "fog" of the Civil war. And importantly, the fact that whites on neither side of the war could do much about it, does not in and of itself make them, de facto, champions of black freedom. Had they been able to do so, the gates of freedom would have surely been securely slammed shut again.

Even the Thirteenth Amendment, which was to follow in the wake of the war, was little more than an after-the-fact ratification of an existing condition: in effect a fait accompli resulting too from the lingering chaos of the war. Put simply, the barn gate of slavery had been blown open as a result of the chaos of the war, and the slaves had simply walked out and into the breeze of freedom -- such as it was at the time. After the fact, they could not very easily be corralled back into the pen. At least, that is, not until the "Redemption;" that followed "Reconstruction" and the 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes; which was itself followed by the Dred Scott Decision, which together as a package, effectively rendered the Thirteenth Amendment null and void. The cold-blooded truth revealed in this book is that in both the North and the South, emancipation was entirely forced upon whites in both regions by the exigencies and the chaos of the Civil War.

Thus, the actual "freeing of the slaves" was not a single act as is often depicted in traditional American history. It was not a heroic single act of white American magnanimity, or an enduring act on their part -- evidence of an ever-dying love for freedom. Rather, emancipation was a long process, which the "fog" of the Civil war started and the Thirteenth Amendment completed. There is no evidence in the historical records to be found that supports the thesis that whites on neither side of the war, including Lincoln himself, ever had any definite plans of freeing the slaves as a single act of emancipation.

Quite the contrary was true in fact: Whites, whether north or south, were never actually enthusiastic about ending slavery even when they were "backed" into a corner and no longer had a choice in the matter. Nor were they ever openly supportive of it, even when it seemed clear that it would happen no matter what they felt or did about it. And most importantly, even the Abolitionists, who DID support freeing the slaves (for their own selfish moral and religious reasons), were not at the time supporters of making the freed slaves citizens of the U.S. And on this very point, it should be mentioned that even in the North it is a little known fact that freedmen there were often denied U.S. citizenship. And rather surprisingly, and unconscionably, this logic held true even for Black soldiers fighting and dying on either side of the Civil War battlefield. Thus all events in the aftermath of the war, including the feeble, limp and lackadaisical efforts on the part of the Freedman Bureau to support the virtually starving freedmen in the south, converge to support the thesis of this book: that black freedom was a fallout of, rather than a cause of, or a conscious result of, the Civil War, and that there were no conscious plans for ever freeing the slaves.

And at the risk of repetition, what this book makes crystal clear is that the slaves of North America essentially "freed" themselves by seizing the opportunity left in the gap when the gates of freedom flung open as a direct result of the chaos of the Civil War. This is an entirely believable story that calls into question the myths that we have been taught in American history: that the North did indeed have a plan for freeing the slaves: it was called the Civil War itself; and that President Lincoln was indeed the "great Emancipator. Yet, the legend that there was such a plan and that Lincoln was such an "Emancipator," falls flat and bely both the facts of history and the logic of this book. Without the support of either logic or facts, the myth of the "great Emancipator" reduces to little more than propaganda unsupportable by any known set of facts of history, or by the logic of the social conditions of the times; and certainly not by any of the decisions actually taken by policy makers on either side of the war.

To wit, Lincoln did not even agree to allow blacks to fight in the Union Army until it was an absolute military necessity, and then did so only with the greatest of reluctance. But more importantly, and this is the most telling point of all, just as had been the same case during the Revolutionary War, slaves who fought for Lincoln's Union army (or for the Colonists Revolutionary army, or the army of the Confederacy for that matter) were not freed! None of these soldiers were freed legally until the Thirteenth Amendment was enacted. In fact, Lincoln, in an act that can only be described as a colossal act of cynicism and cowardice, actually only freed the slaves in territories controlled by Rebel armies. The 200,000 who fought side-by-side with his Union soldiers, and who, arguably proved to be the decisive factor in winning the war for the North, remained in bondage even in the North and even under Lincoln's own command! Under such circumstances, it is not unreasonable to ask, how indeed could such a person be called the "great Emancipator?"

Readers may recall that this was exactly what had happened during the Revolutionary War. Blacks who fought on the side of the Americans with General George Washington, were not freed and made citizens of the U.S. as a result of their heroism in the war -- even while, at the same time, the British side was offering both freedom and British citizenship to the more than 100,000 slaves who fought on the British side. The best the "Americans" (the champions, as it were, of white only freedom) could muster was a promise of exile to their own black only colony somewhere else in the world, or a future unspecified timetable for their eventual freedom in the U.S. Which, as subsequent history has shown, were both, in any case, "dead letters."

The truth is that in both the North and the South, emancipation was entirely forced upon whites by the exigencies of the Civil war. And with that point cleared up once and for all in the first essay, the remaining essays, demonstrate even more dramatically how survival for the slave was purposely made an exceedingly difficult obstacle course: with no land, no tools, no visible means of survival, it was just a matter of time before the "wandering tribes of freedmen" would be forced to succumb to the appeals of a return to a new kind of quasi-slavery called "sharecropping," "work release programs," and still the U.S. favorite, the American penal system. The effects of this failure to provide a secure place in the American economic, social and political system for its "freed" slaves, still have deep ramification that are felt painfully even today.

Five Stars