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Vol. 26:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 1998
Documenting the History of Emancipation: The Freedmen and Southern Society Project
In the fall of 1976, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland launched a systematic search of those records at the National Archives that promised to yield material for a documentary history of emancipation. These records, created and collected by agencies of the Union and Confederate governments, provide an unrivaled source for understanding the passage of black people from slavery to freedom.
Private Hubbard Pryor, 44th United States Colored Infantry, before and after his enlistment in the Union army. Photographs by Earl McDonald, National Archives and Records Administration.
Such governmental entities as the Colored Troops Division of the Adjutant General's Office; the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission; the Union army at every level of command; army support organizations in Washington, including the Judge Advocate General's Office, the Provost Marshal General's Bureau, and the Quartermaster General's Office, and their subordinates in the field; the Civil War Special Agencies of the Treasury Department; individual regiments of U.S. Colored Troops; various branches of the Confederate government (whose records fell into Union hands at the conclusion of the war); the Southern Claims Commission; the Freedmen's Bank; and, most important, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, all played a role in the coming of freedom.
The missions of these agencies placed them in close contact with a wide variety of ordinary people, and their bureaucratic structure provided a mechanism for the preservation of many records of people generally dismissed as historically mute. Not only did extraordinary numbers of ex-slaves, many of them newly literate, put pen to paper in the early years of freedom, but hundreds of others, entirely illiterate, gave depositions to government officials, placed their marks on resolutions passed at mass meetings, testified before courts-martial and Freedmen's Bureau courts, and dictated letters to more literate black people and to white officials and teachers.
The written record thus created constitutes an unparalleled outpouring from people caught up in the emancipation process. Predictably, many of these documents requested official action to redress wrongs committed by powerful former slaveholders who only reluctantly recognized ex-slaves as free, rarely as equal. Others, however, originated in relationships entirely outside the purview of either Federal officials or former masters and employers. They include, for example, correspondence between black soldiers and their families, and between kinfolk who had been separated during slavery. That such letters fell for various reasons into the bureaucratic net of government agencies (and thus were preserved along with official records) should not obscure their deeply personal origins.
The project's editors selected more than 40,000 items, representing perhaps two percent of the documents they examined. Subsequent research has expanded the collection to about 50,000 documents. Indexed and cross-referenced topically, chronologically, and geographically, this collection constitutes the universe from which the documents published in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 are selected and annotated, and from which the editors' introductory essays are written. Project director Leslie S. Rowland, who has been part of Freedom since its inception, can claim a thorough familiarity with the records from the initial stages of their selection.
Selected out of the mass of purely administrative records, these documents convey, perhaps as no historian can, the experience of the liberated: the quiet personal satisfaction of meeting an old master on equal terms, and the outrage of ejection from a segregated horsecar; the elation of a fugitive enlisting in the Union army, and the humiliation of a laborer cheated out of hard-earned wages; the joy of a family reunion after years of forced separation, and the distress of having a child involuntarily apprenticed to a former owner; the hope that freedom would bring a new world, and the fear that, in so many ways, life would be much as before. Similar records offer insight into the equally diverse reactions of planters, Union officers, and Southern yeomen - men and women who faced emancipation with different interests and expectations.
The editors found it imperative from the outset to be selective. They have focused their attention upon the wartime and postwar experiences of slaves and ex-slaves, but have also sought to illuminate the social, economic, and political setting of the emancipation process. The formation of Federal policy, for example, is not central to the project's concerns, except insofar as the preconceptions and actions of policymakers influenced the shape that freedom assumed. Therefore, Freedom does not undertake a history of the Freedmen's Bureau, the U.S. Army, the Bureau of Colored Troops, or any other government agency; nonetheless, documents about the operations of these agencies are prominent when they describe activities of freedpeople and shed light upon the context in which former slaves struggled to construct their own lives. Throughout the selection process, the editors labored to reconstruct the history of the freedpeople themselves, rather than the institutions that surrounded them.
Above all, the editors seek to delineate the central elements of the process by which men and women moved from the utter dependence slaveholders demanded but never fully received, to the independence freedpeople desired but seldom attained. This process began with the slow breakdown of slavery on the periphery of the South and extended to the establishment of the social, economic, and political institutions black people hoped would secure their independence.
The editors have also sought to recognize the diversity of black life and the emancipation process by selecting documents that illustrate the varied experiences of the former slaves in different parts of the South who labored at diverse tasks and who differed from one another in sex, in age, and in social or economic status. Although former slaves, like other men and women in transition from bondage to freedom, wanted to enlarge their liberty and ensure their independence from their former masters, how they desired to do so and what they meant by freedom were tempered by their previous experiences as well as by the circumstances in which they were enmeshed.
Reflecting the editors' interest in a social history of emancipation, Freedom is organized thematically following the process of emancipation. At each step the editors have selected documents that illustrate processes they believe are central to the transition from slavery to freedom. The first two series concentrate primarily on the years of the Civil War. Series 1 documents the destruction of slavery, the diverse circumstances under which slaves claimed their freedom, and the wartime labor arrangements that developed as slavery collapsed. Series 2 examines the recruitment of black men into the Union army and the experiences of black soldiers under arms.
Series 3, 4, and 5 explore the earliest years of postwar Reconstruction. They document the struggle for land, the evolution of new labor arrangements, relations with former masters and other whites, law and justice, violence and other extralegal repression, geographical mobility, family relationships, education, religion, the structure and activities of the black community, and black politics in the early years of Reconstruction.
The series, to be published in nine volumes, is organized as follows:
- Series 1: The Destruction of Slavery and the Wartime Genesis of Free Labor (complete in three volumes)
- Series 2: The Black Military Experience (complete in one volume)
- Series 3: Land, Capital, and Labor
- Series 4: Race Relations, Violence, Law, and Justice
- Series 5: The Black Community: Family, Church, School, and Society
In addition to these volumes, four "spin-off" volumes have also been published for classroom use and general reading:
- Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War
- Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War
- Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era
- Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War
In its aim, approach, and editorial universe, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project differs fundamentally from most historical editing projects. Rather than searching out the complete manuscript records of an individual man or woman, the project examines a process of social transformation. Freedom endeavors to combine the strengths of the traditional interpretive monograph with the rich diversity of the documentary edition while addressing in one historical setting a central question of the human experience: how men and women strive to enlarge their freedom and secure their independence from those who would dominate their lives.
