Illusions of Emancipation

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520 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 25 halftones, notes, bibl., index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4836-1
Published: March 2019
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6156-8
Published: August 2020
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-4837-8
Published: January 2019
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-7020-9
Published: January 2019

Littlefield History of the Civil War Era

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Awards & distinctions

Bancroft Prize, Columbia University

2020 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History, John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia

Finalist, 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize

As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly.

In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.