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

236 Pages·2015·0.75 MB·English

by  Ira Berlin

The Long Emancipation
The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures

Ira Berlin
The Long
Emancipation
The Demise of Slavery
in the United States
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts,
and London, England
2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Ame rica
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-674-28608-5
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Th e Near- Century- Long 12
Demise of Slavery
2 Sounding the Egalitarian Clarion 47
3 Th e Bloody Strug gle Endures 106
Coda: Free at Last 158
Notes 177
Ac know ledg ments 213
Index 217

The Long Emancipation

Introduction
H
istory is not about the past; it is about argu-
ments we have about the past. And because it is
about arguments that we have, it is about us. In the
study of American history, few arguments have been
as impassioned and pers ist ent as the seemingly end-
less debates about the nature and causes of slavery’s
demise. Who did it, how, and why—a nd ultimately,
what was its meaning? Th e tenacious nature of this
argument speaks to the centrality of freedom in
American life, which, in turn, is embedded in the
very meaning of American citizenship as stated in
the nation’s founding charters and in its connection
to the nation’s most critical contemporary social
prob lem: racism. For the American people, the
strugg le to abolish slavery, secured by constitutional