A common trend among modern historians is to assert that the slaves in the United States “freed themselves” during the Civil War, as opposed to “being freed” by external forces such as the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union victory in the war, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Early proponents of this view included historians such as Vincent Harding, Robert Engs, and Barbara Fields in the 1980s and ‘90s. Harding, in claiming that the slaves “self-emancipated” themselves, wrote in his 1981 book There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America:
“This was black struggle in the South as the guns roared, coming out of loyal and disloyal states, creating their own liberty. … Every day they came into the Northern lines, in every condition, in every season of the year, in every state of health. … This was the river of black struggle in the South, waiting for no one to declare freedom for them, hearing only the declarations of God in the sound of the guns, and moving.”
Engs, in a 1991 paper entitled “The Great American Slave Rebellion” stated simply: “The slaves freed themselves.” And Fields, in Ken Burns’ 1990 PBS television documentary The Civil War and an accompanying book, stated that “freedom did not come to the slaves from words on paper, either the words of Congress or those of the President. … The slaves themselves had to make their freedom real.”
The theme has been picked up by many others since. A March 19, 2013 article in New African magazine, for example, stated bluntly: “Fact one: The slaves freed themselves when the Civil War began in 1861.” And a historian and professor whom I know said in an NPR radio interview in 2020: “You study the history of the Civil War, African-Americans freed themselves. So many slaves kept escaping into Union lines that it forced Lincoln to have to deal with … the issue of slavery.”
It is true that some slaves were able to “free themselves”, even before the outbreak of the Civil War, either by purchasing their freedom or – as well-known people such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Robert Smalls did – by fleeing their masters. But for every slave who was successful in running away, many others were not and were recaptured or even killed. And if Douglass, Tubman, and Smalls had faced different situations, their outcomes may have been very different, and their names lost to history. [It should also be pointed out that some slaves gained their freedom by simply being freed (manumitted) by their owners.]
It is also true that once the Civil War began, and as the Union forces advanced, more and more slaves were able to gain their freedom. They fled their owners and sought protection from Union forces or made their way north via the Underground Railroad to freedom in the northern states or in Canada.
These slaves who managed to escape also harmed the Confederacy and her slaveocracy in myriad ways: by transferring their manpower from the Confederacy to the Union, by joining the Union military, by serving as guides and spies, etc., all of which helped to bring about an end to slavery and thus gain and preserve their own freedom.
But this brings us back to the question: Why were they able to do all this, at this time? Why hadn’t they escaped in large numbers in the 1840s or the 1740s or the 1640s?
The reason they were able to do all this during the Civil War was that the political, social, and military situation had dramatically changed. External forces which had previously prevented their escape from bondage had evolved so much that the slaves were now enabled to “free themselves”.
It all began with Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, followed by the secession of the first seven Confederate states, the outbreak of the war in April 1861, and then the secession of four additional states. As the war intensified, Congress passed two Confiscation Acts in August 1861 and July 1862 which authorized Union forces to seize rebel property, including slaves. This meant that slaves escaping to Union lines would no longer be returned to their owners, and therefore provided a huge incentive for them to make the attempt. Congress also abolished slavery in the District of Columbia in April 1862, freeing about 3,000 slaves.
Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, giving notice to the Confederate states that if they didn’t return to the Union by January 1, 1863, he would declare their slaves to be free. On January 1, he issued the final Proclamation, in which he also dropped references to compensation for slaveowners and to voluntary colonization of the slaves elsewhere, and added the provision that freed slaves could serve in the Union military in non-combat positions. The war was now no longer just about preserving the Union; it was now also about ridding the nation of slavery. This in turn made it less likely that foreign nations would intervene on the side of the Confederacy.
Lincoln’s proclamation declared that all slaves in the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons” [emphasis added]. There is no evidence that the slaves objected to the government “recognizing and maintaining” their freedom; they didn’t say: “don’t bother, we can free ourselves”. No, instead, many slaves and freedmen had spent the night of December 31 at Watch Night meetings, praying to God that Lincoln would follow through on his promise. In the words of Frederick Douglass, who attended such a meeting in Boston: “We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky, which should rend the fetters of four millions of slaves … we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries.”
The next step was obvious: allow black men to serve in combat, which as Douglass noted, would be a sure path to eventual citizenship. All the while, the Lincoln administration was prodding the border states (the four slave states which had not joined the Confederacy) to emancipate their slaves. And the final blow, of course, would be the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude from the whole nation; this was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865 and sent to the states for ratification.
As all of these events transpired, making a successful escape from slavery increasingly more likely, more and more slaves made the attempt. But again, the critical point is that without these events, without these external forces, nothing would have changed from the situation of the 1850s, when relatively few slaves were able to escape their bondage.
It wasn’t that the slaves in the 1850s, or the 1840s, or the 1830s, or all the way back to the 1620s, didn’t want to be free or didn’t know that they could be free if they would simply “free themselves”. No, the fact is that they were not able to free themselves; what was missing was those external forces. The relatively few who did manage to escape may have used their cunning and their bravery, but they also most likely took advantage of some fortunate situation to facilitate their escape. And for the vast majority of slaves brought to or born in America from 1619 through the beginning of the Civil War, that fortunate situation never presented itself and they had no real opportunity to flee.
Consider the Hebrew slaves in Egypt in the time of Moses. Why were they enslaved for more than 400 years? Didn’t they know that they could just “free themselves” any time they wanted to? No, it took some kind of external force; in their case, a miraculous intervention on the part of God.
Saying that slaves can free themselves masks the horror of slavery, and in particular American chattel slavery as practiced in the English colonies and later the newly formed United States. After all, if slaves can free themselves any time they want, then slavery must not be such a horrible thing.
In all this, historians love to talk about “agency”, that by taking matters into their hands, the slaves had some degree of control over their situations, that they still had some dignity. Otherwise, it seems so demeaning, so dehumanizing.
But that is precisely the point: slavery truly is dehumanizing; it does reduce one’s dignity; it does mean that one doesn’t have control over one’s life. So to insist on “agency” is, again, to mask the horror of slavery. The job of a historian isn’t to make people feel good about themselves or their situations; it is to discover and impart the truth about history, discomforting as that truth might be to modern sensibilities.
This whole issue was exemplified and amplified in 2020 in the controversy about the Emancipation Memorial or Freedmen’s Memorial in Boston. This statue, erected in 1879, was a copy of one in Washington, DC located just east of the Capitol. Funds for the original statue in Washington were raised by former slaves, while a benefactor paid for the copy in Boston.
The statues show a standing Abraham Lincoln, holding the Emancipation Proclamation in his right hand, with his left hand outstretched over a kneeling black man, whose chains are broken: a former slave, now free. To some, the black man is still kneeling and thus still in a position of subservience; to others, with his right knee off the ground, he is preparing to stand and take his rightful place as a free man.
After protests, the City of Boston removed their statue; the one in Washington still stands, for now. The mayor of Boston supported the decision to remove their statue, saying: “It’s clear that residents and visitors to Boston have been uncomfortable with this statue, and its reductive representation of the black man’s role in the abolitionist movement.” I.e., they objected to the lack of agency attributed to the former slaves in gaining their freedom.
In the ongoing debate on this whole subject, there are two extremes which are clearly erroneous: first, that none of the slaves had anything to do with gaining their freedom, and second, that they had everything to do with it, to the exclusion of any external forces assisting their efforts. The truth clearly lies somewhere in the middle. But to take what was true for a small minority of the slave population – those who were able to truly “free themselves” – and apply it to the entire slave population would seem to be a gross exaggeration and a historical fallacy.
When it comes to learning about the hard truths about slavery, about what it really meant to be a slave, and about what it meant to be delivered from bondage, it would be best to learn from those who actually experienced both the horror of slavery and the joy of deliverance. I would learn from those very people who had experienced it all for themselves, such as those former slaves who funded the Washington Emancipation Memorial, and who understood that without the outside assistance of others – Lincoln, the Congress, the abolitionists, and millions of Union soldiers and sailors, 350,000 of whom would give their lives for the cause – they would still be in the shackles of slavery, for they could not “free themselves”.
In addition, it should be noted that inaccurate ideas about our history don’t just affect our understanding of the past; they can also distort our understanding of our own times. It is extremely well documented that various forms of slavery exist in our own day, from forced child labor to human trafficking. And someone who believes that slaves in the past did or could have freed themselves will be more likely to think: why don’t these people in our own times just free themselves? They could do so if they really wanted to. Adopting such a view would naturally lead to a belief that the vital work of governments, non-governmental organizations, and individual people to fight against modern forms of slavery aren’t really needed, as they could just “free themselves”. And that would be a great tragedy.
Kevin J. Wood
December 12, 2024