 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Doug Swanson, Visitor Services Manager for the National Archives Museum and the producer of the Noontime Lecture Series. On behalf of David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, I'd like to welcome you to the McGowan Theater located in the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. Before we hear from Joseph Reedy on his new book, Illusions of Emancipation, The Pursuit of Freedom and the Equality and the Twilight of Slavery, I'd like to mention some other programs that are going to be taking place in the McGowan Theater. This evening, February 27th at 7 p.m., there will be a documentary screening of Addiction, which discusses the current opioid epidemic, following the film, there will be a panel of experts here to discuss the opioid addictions. Tomorrow evening at 7 p.m., in celebration of Lincoln's birthday, we will present a discussion between historian Harold Holzer and history professor Edna Green Medford as they explore Medford's book, Monument Man, the Life and the Art of Daniel Chester French, who created the statue for the Lincoln Memorial. A book signing will follow that program. Then as a side note, originally the Emancipation Proclamation was supposed to be on display over President's Day weekend, but unfortunately due to the previous government shutdown, we were unable to do so. A new date has been selected, so the Emancipation Proclamation will be on display April 14th through 16th, and the D.C. Emancipation Act will also be on display that same time. To find out more about these, our other programs and our exhibits, please visit our website at www.archives.gov. You will also find some printed materials about upcoming events in the theater lobby, as well as a sign up sheet to receive an electronic version of our monthly calendar. Our topic for today is Illusions of Emancipation, the Pursuit of Freedom and the Equality in the Twilight of Slavery by Joseph P. Reedy. Professor Reedy is an award winning author and historian, an emeritus professor at Howard University, where he taught history and served in various administrative positions from 1984 until his retirement in 2017. After receiving an undergraduate degree in sociology from Villanova University, he earned the master's and doctoral degrees in history from Northern Illinois University. I went to Southern Illinois. Specializing in 19th century United States, from 1977 to 1984, he was an editor with the Friedman and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland College Park, where he collaborated in producing the first four volumes in the award winning series titled Freedom, A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861 to 1867. He also collaborated in producing three other books focusing on emancipation during the Civil War, one of which, Free at Last, A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom and the Civil War, was awarded the Lincoln Prize in 1994. Reedy also authored a study of slavery and emancipation in 19th century Georgia, titled From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South, Central Georgia, 1800 to 1880. His articles and chapters have appeared in academic journals and collections of essays on the Civil War era. A particular note is his overview of the experience of black sailors in the wartime U.S. Navy titled Black Men in Navy Blue during the Civil War, which appeared in Prologue Quarterly, the Quarterly Magazine of the National Archives and Records Administration in Fall 2001. He has lectured widely on slavery, emancipation in the Civil War, and made radio appearances on National Public Radio and WPFW. His current book, Illusions of Emancipation, synthesizes his many years of research and writing on the demise of slavery during the Civil War. Please join me in welcoming Joseph P. Reedy to the National Archives. Thank you, Mr. Swanson, and good afternoon, everybody. It's my great pleasure to be here. I can't tell you quite how much of a pleasure it is, given the many years that I spent in the research room doing much of the work that you'll see reflected in the book and what I'll be talking about today. And I'm especially grateful to Archivists of the United States, David Ferriero, for making this venue available, essentially, to give birth to this book in its printed form. While standing in the building, I can't help, as I said, reflecting on the years that I spent here, but I also have to mention several people who influenced me greatly during those years. The first is a former military archivist of the old military records here at the National Archives, namely Dr. Sarah Dunlop Jackson, who was responsible for tutoring and, as she said, putting through her finishing school literally generations of historians. And also, I must remember Dr. Ira Berlin, who was, in fact, the editor and founder of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, on which I worked for seven years, who untimely passed away last summer. And most of all, it's the priceless collections of records here at the National Archives that I really want to celebrate this morning. Many historians had worked with them, but until we, with the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, went through them systematically, only then did we realize what an incredible treasure trove of information about the breakdown of slavery and about the quest for freedom and justice on the part of formerly enslaved and, in fact, freeborn African-Americans. All right, so let's begin with this notion of illusions of emancipation. And I'd like to touch on that concept of illusions several times over the course of my presentation. But what I'm suggesting here is several things. First of all, between 1861 and 1865, the institution of slavery came to an end in the United States of America. Down to 1860, in fact, even beyond that, slavery was one of the founding pillars of American society. But within four short years, it was no more, at least in a legal sense. So what was it that accounted for that remarkably rapid change? And how do we explain it? How do we understand it? What meaning does it have, both for those who experienced it and for later generations? Now, many historians, in fact, from the time of the Civil War, right down to the present, explain the process largely in terms of government actions. And here, I hope I don't give away too much by saying, and specifically, actions on the part of Abraham Lincoln, who, of course, was president of the United States during that time. But it's not just those actions. So part of the notion of illusion has to do with what happens if we look at government action as the key, if not the only explanation for emancipation, when, in fact, the process is more complicated than that. So what I try to do in the book is to explore three concepts, one time, two space, both of which, of course, are kind of standard fare whereby historians try to make sense out of the past. And the third concept is the concept of home. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But with regard to time and space, I do not consider them to be the straightforward products that we normally think of them, conceptual products, that is. Time, typically, say, for example, in the form of this wristwatch or in the form of a calendar, can have a chronological form. But that doesn't explain all the ways in which time unrolled over the course of the Civil War and how people who were alive at the time experienced time. And let me give you one example of what many Civil War-era individuals described as the revolutionary changes that were swirling all around them. In 1864, this is after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the United States Army began recruiting African-American men, General William T. Sherman, who I'm sure you know by reputation as one of the most effective Union Army generals, was still reluctant to permit African-American soldiers into his fighting forces. Now as it turned out, there was a recruiter operating in the state of Tennessee who was under orders from the War Department to enlist as many African-American men as he possibly could. But General Sherman was very leery about A, letting him recruit within his command, and B, putting those men to work as soldiers. So the comment that this recruiter made was that General Sherman appeared to be two years behind the times. And he says, and these are two of the revolutionary type years, century type years through which we're living. So here is a person who is in the midst of the whirlwind. That was the Civil War, looking at time, both in conventional terms of years, but saying centuries could become compressed into those years. So there's not just something a losery going on here, but there's something extremely complex that we probably need to pay attention to. Now familiar places and spaces had a similar kind of moving composition during the Civil War. So familiar places became unfamiliar, as armies tramped through them as people got displaced. And by the same token, unfamiliar places became familiar. And places as small as a slave cabin, for example, could take on enormous influence and, in fact, importance in the struggle to become free, just as large panoramas could, the entire South, all the territory of the Confederacy. So what I'm saying here is time and space appeared to have shifting characters and not just the fixed ones that we normally associate with them. And this is part of what contributed to this concept of illusion that I work with in the book. So one way in which the persons who were living through all this confusion attempted to make sense out of it was through the concept of home. So they wanted to use home as a way of maintaining their bearings. But keep in mind that this too was a shifting concept. So within the household of enslaved families, for example, the home and the family took on very different connotations as slavery broke down, and then especially as it ended, and a new world, one of freedom, and hopefully one of equality, opened up before them. But by the same token, the concept of home was not confined exclusively to the dwelling house. And in fact, it could arrange as far as the abstract concept of the nation. And many people at the time, as in fact, we do today in the 21st century, speak about the national home, the United States is our home. And of course, a neighborhood could be a home as well. But these two were shifting just as time and space were shifting during this time period. But in any case, through these three concepts, I try to explore what did the breakdown of slavery mean in the lives who were affected by it? And especially, of course, that means persons who were enslaved at the start of the war. But it also means others, including abolitionists, including free African-Americans who were living in the North who had as much a vested interest in the end of slavery as did enslaved African-Americans in the South. All right, so back to Lincoln again and the actions of Congress. That provides a kind of a handy, their actions and those laws that were passed during the Civil War provide a kind of a handy timeline. And often we think of not just Civil War history, but in fact, national history in this timeline sense, that we assume that events happen in sequence, a temporal sequence from then to now, from now into the future, and that certain of these events are noteworthy, whether we call it an emancipation, proclamation, or 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. So these are fixed events that can be plotted on a timeline. But timelines do not tell all. Obviously, in light of the remarks I made a few minutes ago about the different stakeholders in the process of emancipation, there were different timelines. So Lincoln's timeline didn't necessarily apply to enslaved people who were attempting to become free. I mean, it was there, it was a reference point, but that might not have been the preoccupation of their time from minute to minute and from day to day. So timelines don't quite get us there. So part of what I'm trying to do is come up with an alternative framework that can get us away from this notion of a timeline from then to now, from now into the future. And in fact, often timelines as depicted in United States history have an implicit understanding that things get better over time. So what I would also like to suggest is not only do they not occur in this sort of straight line linear fashion, but things are not always getting better. All right, so some of you may recall having seen in the New York Times last fall, this op-ed piece by a philosopher by the name of Crispin Sartwell. How would you draw history? So this is kind of what I was just describing. So these are various ways in which not just philosophers like Sartwell or historians have attempted to describe the passage of time. So to the left you've got the linear version of the timeline. There couldn't be some sort of a circular version. Perhaps the best representation of which would be cyclical, perhaps seasonal patterns in time. So fall occurs at a predictable time each year. So things do kind of circle back around on each other. And then another option is this loop theory where things, they move kind of forward implicitly but they're getting better at times. They're getting not so better at others. And I won't read the fine print there but you can go back to the original and find how on the top certain things are labeled as presumably better whereas at the bottom there labeled as not so better. But in any case, even these timelines don't fully comprehend how human action affects this motion. So this is part of what the challenge is too. All right so here's another way to depict this. Not so much in terms of timeline but in terms of the actors who are performing the acts that generate the passage of time and the noteworthy events in it that we wish to commemorate. This as you know is a statue that resides about 10 blocks away from where we stand. When it was unveiled in 1876 the featured speaker was Frederick Douglass and despite the fact that President Grant was also there and many other luminaries and Frederick Douglass had to in effect cast his remarks in terms that would have national significance and not just significance for him as a former slave. He did point out that this didn't quite capture the full reality and even to the extent that it did he suggested that it might indicate that Lincoln was the white man's president more so than the black man's president. And he did this to some extent to be contrary to some small degree but he really wanted to get the attention focused on the man who is kneeling there in the statue. As it turns out this was a replica of an actual man who had escaped from slavery in Missouri during the Civil War, a man by the name of Archer Alexander. Now there was a report in the paper last spring indicating that genealogists have discovered that in fact Muhammad Ali is a direct descendant of the real life Archer Alexander. Alexander was his great great grandfather. But the point here simply is that in one view not just of the timeline but of emancipation it's Lincoln who is doing the acting and Archer Alexander and perhaps in the Q and A we could talk a bit about their respective clothing and what that might have represented. He is being freed. So action is being taken by Lincoln and perhaps all the members of Congress that affect his life. And Douglas was suggesting that actions that Alexander took affected his life and this statute doesn't capture any of that whatsoever. Now in 1940 the renowned Howard University historian Charles H. Westley also commented on this statue and he suggested that it's a total misrepresentation and he said, again keep in mind this is 1940 this is totally out of keeping with the way that we tell African-American history with African-Americans as actors and not as persons being acted upon. So it's part of that notion of this human action that I also want to take into account. Now there's another very famous statue as well and this is courtesy of the Howard University Gallery of Art which in fact is the custodian of the statue. This one was created by Edmonia Lewis who was an African-American sculptor who had the same idea as Thomas Ball who created the one previous to this using some of the same kind of classical images but note here Lincoln is not anywhere in the picture. So from the standpoint of Edmonia Lewis freedom emancipation was entirely an African-American concern and the point she was making is that African-American men and women broke their chains. They stood up, they became free and again to reinforce the concept of home and family she's got a man and a woman in the picture suggesting that the future of freedom really depended to a large extent on the future of that home and that family. Now let's take a look at this to shift the attention away from strictly timeline to add the element of space as well. Now this is a kind of a standard representation in fact you can find representation similar to this in the newspaper today for example about the division of controlled areas in the country of Syria for example with the shifting lines between the Islamic State and between the Syrian forces and so on and so forth. So this idea is not new and what it does is combine the notion of what happened over time and then what happened in space. So in 1861 the United States controlled only a few places along the coast of what were the Confederate States of America but then in 1862 as US forces began to move southward then this area came under US control. 1863 it expanded still farther to this area here more to the interior and these horizontal lines represent what happened in 1864 in terms of the advancement of union forces and control. All of which looks very neat and simple the fact however is that reality on the ground didn't reflect this at all. For one thing this doesn't take into account how lines were blurred so it looked very neat here on the map in terms of these lines at the end of the year at best as a snapshot at the end of the year but picture how that would have looked on the ground. Where does that line fall? So does that mean union authority is solid on one side and Confederate authority is solid on the other no not really in fact not at all. The lines were blurred and so the actions of people both in time and in space are completely unrepresented or misrepresented by this kind of map. And in case any of you are still doubting it this large swath right here is supposed to represent Sherman's march from Atlanta to Savannah which occurred late in 1864 November and December of 1864. But keep in mind that when Sherman's army made that march they moved to Savannah they didn't occupy this area here at all. In fact from there then they started to move into South Carolina. So that completely misrepresents areas under union control at that time. In fact the staggering thing is that at the end of the war when Robert E. Lee surrendered so much of the original Confederate territory was still under Confederate control. And probably 2.6 out of 3.5 of the enslaved African-Americans in Confederate territory were still being held as slaves at the end of the war. About 80% of the original antebellum total. So again I'm suggesting that casual depictions of time either in simple terms of a straight line linear formation or casual depictions of space don't really do justice to how confusing and confused much of this was. One thing however I think we can say that if we pull together the notion of home it could not be better depicted than this illustration by Thomas Nast. And although this version of it was printed in 1865 the original version dates from 1863. And to do this very quickly I would like to suggest two things. First of all he's got an African-American family in a home setting as the centerpiece of emancipation. So it's not just African-Americans who are thinking along these lines but in fact illustrators for Harper's magazine. But the other thing is he's implicitly incorporating the notions of time that I'm talking about. So on the left side of that centerpiece are the depictions of the time of slavery with the whipping post with sales and people working in the cotton fields and so on. And on this side presumably after emancipation there's a church steeple in the background you see the American flag flying over the school. Here's the household with the mother and the children there. They even got the pet dog right there for good measure. And here are the adults who are lining up to be paid for their work. So their work is not being extracted at the tip of the bull whip. So the home is at the center. Slavery things and ways are gone and a great leap is represented. In fact you could say a one time leap from slavery to freedom. With an implicit supposition that under the influence of the church and the school and the wage African-Americans would be able to take their place as free people and perhaps even as citizens within the republic. All right so that what NAS depicted as a reality was one that bore little representation or little semblance to reality in the lives of most people. But what it did suggest however was that under the influence of the United States government both through the laws and through the proclamations and due to the influence of the armed forces of the United States something resembling federally sponsored freedom was possible. So here's an ideal representation of such federally sponsored freedom. This is a place called Friedman's Village and in fact it sits where now the Pentagon building sits. That property before the start of the war was the estate of General Robert E. Lee. And as you know Lee and his family left the premises and the union authorities took it over very early in the war. Among other things over time it became the site of Arlington National Cemetery but by the spring and summer of 1863 this Friedman's Village was also constructed there. Now here is a representation of how federal authorities thought that freedom could work out if it were only properly structured. So Thomas Nast was getting at that as well of a schoolhouse, the church, the payroll office but federal authorities here went a little bit further. So they took again for granted that the home was the center of it. So around the circle here there were 50 dwelling units each containing two dwellings. So two families could live in each of the houses but over here there were buildings where they could go to school so the children could go to school for example there was a church there and there were workshops where the men and women could learn useful trades so blacksmithing, sewing for the women. The idea being that under the superintendency of the federal government sites like this could provide a stepping stone away from everything that Thomas Nast depicted as the evils of slavery into a well-ordered semblance of freedom. And so this is a photograph from Friedman's Village that shows, well leaving apart the side that has the drainage ditch running right down the center of the street which probably would have been uncomfortable during especially rainy seasons but nonetheless you see not just the people in the homes and outside the homes but beginning of a sense of community as well. So implicit in the home obviously was that could be the building block for a new community and a new community would embrace not only formerly enslaved people but again using the home as a building block it could conceivably extend the citizenship at a local level and perhaps national citizenship as well. All right so that's ideally how things could work under federally sponsored movement from slavery to freedom but again on the ground things were not quite as neat as that. Now this again is a photograph depicting enslaved people that are trying to make their way away from slavery under the protection of the United States Army. So this one happens to depict people who are crossing the Rappahannock River in Virginia and typically at this time they would then be ushered on their way to Washington DC often being transferred to transport steamers so they could make their trip by water from the Rappahannock to the Chesapeake Bay and then up to Potomac but not always. So what this suggests is several things the kind of uncertainty of abandoning home and moving into a new world even with federal protection so I want to emphasize the importance of the federal troops around this particular wagon and its inhabitants who were making their way on this perilous journey but nonetheless it was perilous they have all of their belongings packed into the wagon and where the future lay they couldn't quite be sure. Perhaps it might have been a place like Friedman's Village outside of Washington but not necessarily because there were pitfalls that could be fallen along the way and in many cases people undertook that journey without the protection of federal troops so it made that journey all the more dangerous. Confederate guerrillas loved nothing more than to recapture and return to slavery persons who were attempting to become free. But with some federal protection then that path was cleared. So here's a depiction of a slave quarters which in fact was another version of a contraband camp in Helena, Arkansas in 1864. So this one again shows the buildings and shows the people and some sort of a semblance of community. But what I would like to suggest from this photograph is that despite what looks like a sense of permanence by virtue of those dwellings permanence was not generally the case for the residents of the contraband camps. In some cases federal authorities wanted to move them through the camps and get them off working on their own and use the camps themselves only for those who were most recently coming away from enslavement. So that meant for turnover within there and certain challenge to the development of a sense of community. But even more important in the Mississippi Valley in particular when federal forces were called away and could no longer provide protection for the contraband camps. For example, which happened routinely especially during the Vicksburg campaign of the summer of 1863. That left the camps and their residents vulnerable to confederate attack. And there are dozens if not hundreds of stories of such camps having been broken up by confederates with many people killed, others re-enslaved and hauled back to the place where they thought they had gotten away from. And so this next slide depicts that. So this is called the Stampede of Slaves from Hampton to Fortress Monroe and it depicts a time during the summer of 1861 where federal forces had to pull back from Hampton which they had first occupied as an outpost to their fortress at Monroe and then had to abandon in the aftermath of the Battle of Bull Run. And several thousand African-Americans who had taken refuge there in Hampton under the protection of the United States Army then found that protection disappeared. So they left quickly overnight and made their way in what this artist depicted as a stampede to go to Fortress Monroe for protection there. So what I'm suggesting here is contrary to what Thomas Nast was suggesting, slavery done, emancipation, new life didn't necessarily work in that straight line fashion and it certainly didn't work in one leap. And so some of those persons who managed to escape from slavery could not count on remaining free. And some of them in fact found their, shall we say their timeline heading in that circular fashion. It wasn't linear from slavery to freedom. It was back into slavery again. All right, here's another vivid example in fact taken from the very archives of this building that we stay in. A very famous photograph of Private Hubbard Pryor of the 44th US Colored Infantry. So again, this is playing on that same notion of before and after he arrives in the Union Army camp clad in rags and it becomes enlisted into the United States Army and he puts on the uniform of the United States soldier. So the before obviously the slavery that's left behind and in one great leap that man who was frightened who was probably hungry, ill clad becomes this gentleman here. And you may remember the famous phrase by Frederick Douglass of the effect of putting the army on an African-American man. And he said, once let a black man get upon his person the brass letter US, let him get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship. So Hubbard Pryor there in the US Army uniform I'm sure would have subscribed to Frederick Douglass's notion that he was transformed from property into a man and a man wearing the US Army uniform at that. However, Hubbard Pryor's revolution went backward. He and many men in his regiment were captured in the Confederate assault on Dalton, Georgia in October of 1864. Many of his comrades who were captured in fact were murdered by the Confederates but he and others were re-enslaved essentially to build Confederate railroads. So his voyage from slavery to freedom to emancipation and even under the auspices of the United States Army went back to his serving as a slave of the Confederates. And so he remained until the end of the war and then they walked away and so he walked away but then he had to try to make his way across hostile territory to get home. There are stories of captured African-American soldiers who remained enslaved into the summer of 1865, three and four months after the end of the war. So as much as Frederick Douglass captured at a critical component of African-American military service, he couldn't quite anticipate how the vagaries of the war itself might turn some people's emancipations backward and have them going back into slavery. All right, this is also a very famous document from this building and I'll just spend a minute or two talking about that because I want to get on to another story and talk about that in a little bit more detail. This is a letter from a Missouri African-American soldier named Spotswood Rice that he wrote to his daughters, Marianne and Cora in the fall of 1864. He also wrote a letter to the owner of his daughter, Mary. So this was a woman named Kitty Diggs and Kitty Diggs owned Mary and her brother F.W. Diggs owned Cora and they lived in Glasgow, Missouri. Now the reason that Spotswood Rice was writing to both Kitty Diggs and to his daughters was that he was in a hospital in St. Louis. He had already enlisted in the army but he had contracted rheumatism and he was recuperating there and performing light duty there. And in the confines of that hospital where he had time on his hands and where he had paper that he could write on, he was already literate before he enlisted. He was a tobacco roller in Missouri and he was both literate and served as a foreman on the plantation. He was able to write these letters. He writes to Kitty Diggs telling you, Ms. Kitty, I want to have my children be with me. You refuse to let my daughter go. So here's what I'm gonna do. I've got about a thousand friends who are wearing the uniform of the United States Army with me here in St. Louis. And we intend to march up to Glasgow and woe to you and all the other slaveholders when we arrive there. And he says to her, we'll see you in hell and we'll dispatch you there so you get there quickly. So this would have been unheard of in any other setting except this. And he closes his letter to Kitty Diggs by saying, this whole government gives cheer to me and you cannot help yourself. He would have been hung, if not executed more rapidly than that, had that letter arrived or had he had the time and the composure to send it before the war. Yet here he was at this time writing that letter. And his letter to his children essentially says the same thing, basically that I wrote to Kitty Diggs telling her I'm coming to get you. I will be there, wait for me, I love you. We hope to rejoin the family very quickly. Now the reason that we know about this letter is that F.W. Diggs who owned Cora was the postmaster of the post office in Glasgow, Missouri. So it's not hard to imagine what went through his mind when he saw this handwriting addressing a letter to his sister Kitty Diggs and no doubt he opened the letter and then he saw what the contents of it were. So he sent it to the commander of the department of the Missouri at the time and that's how these letters survive in the military records here at the National Archives. Now there's much more to say about that obviously but as I said I don't wanna dwell too much on it now and perhaps we can come back to it during the question and answer. But this is a piece that I want to talk about especially this morning as a way of suggesting the complications that attended emancipation every step of the way and complications that to some extent can be understood a little bit better by looking critically at these notions of time and space and home. All right, what you see there obviously is the corner of a typical map of Washington, D.C. and there were hundreds, not thousands of these things produced during the 19th century. This one dates from 1862. Now I lopped off this right corner here for a particular reason. Right about there, close to the border between Washington County District of Columbia and Prince George's County, Maryland, a farm owner by the name of Alexander McCormick kept a farm on which he had six enslaved people and several other hired people. And he had a farmhouse that probably was several hundred yards inside the District of Columbia line in Washington County. All right, so that's the setting. He'd had that farmhouse for years and slave people had been working there in some cases for generations. When the Emancipation Act of April 16th, 1862 freed the slaves in the District of Columbia, it didn't end slavery right away. There was a provision in that act for compensation to the owners of slaves who could produce papers indicating that they were so-called legitimate owners up to $300. But that meant a process whereby the owners would submit the papers and then a body of commissioners would evaluate the authenticity and then make a decision whether or not the claimed owner was entitled to compensation. So the law gave the owners 90 days to submit that paperwork. So that's from mid-April to mid-July they had to submit the paperwork. So what we think of normally as something that happened overnight or immediately on the day of April 16th didn't happen that way at all. In the best case it took weeks, in some cases three months for the owner to submit the paperwork and then for all of the examination to occur and then finally for the certificates of freedom to be issued to the freed people. But guess what, over the 90 days not all of the owners submitted such claims. So Congress passed a supplemental act on July 12th, 1862 permitting the recipients of freedom namely the enslaved African-Americans to submit petitions on their own behalf. So here three months has gone by the master is not submitting anything. Mercifully Congress permits people to make their own case. So these cases begin coming into the commissioners beginning in July of 1862. And there were hundreds of them. And many people advocated on their own behalf. The law permitted them to testify on their own behalf. They brought neighbors, they brought friends, they brought attorneys, they brought others to make the case. So Alexander McCormick, excuse me was pretty much smug and assuming that the enslaved people who belonged to him were going to remain with him. And he did not submit the papers asking for compensation. And he kind of blandly assumed that they would not submit papers asking for their freedom. Well, as it turned out, he was wrong as he found out over the next several months. To make the long story short, he decided that in fact the people who were living the enslaved people who were living with him there were not entitled to freedom. And he had two reasons for this. Number one, his property straddled the Maryland line. So he was assuming he could make a case, they lived and worked in Maryland, therefore they were not eligible. But secondly, he presumed that the law was unconstitutional and would be declared unconstitutional by the courts. So he wasn't gonna do anything to cooperate with it. But by the fall of 1862, the protagonist of this part of the story, one of his slaves, a woman named Emeline Wedge and her sister, Alice Thomas, and Emeline Wedge's two children submitted a petition for their own recognition as free people. And so then that opened an investigation into it. And what's more, Emeline Wedge and her sister, Alice Thomas, had a mother, Mary Thomas, who also lived there on the property, and Mary Thomas submitted a paper of her own and it was recognized and Alexander McCormick didn't challenge that. However, when Emeline Wedge and Alice Thomas submitted their petitions, he decided to challenge it. So testimony went on for weeks and weeks and weeks and the story went something like this. Despite the fact that they lived there, he built a new house for the enslaved people on the Maryland side of the lawn. But knowing that the law said they needed to have lived and worked in the district, he figured, all right, well, I've got them living in Maryland now. And apparently this was some ramshackle structure that he just cobbled together and he expected the women and the children to live in it. But he had to figure out a way to get them to work in Maryland too. So he must have been quite the imaginative fellow. So he hired a free black woman in effect to walk the cattle who lived in a pen or who spent the nights in a pen by the farmhouse in the district, walked them to the district line and then hand them over to Emeline Wedge and Alice Thomas so Emeline and Alice could mine them in a pasture in Maryland during the day. And then at night they would reverse the same deal. So Emeline and Alice would walk the cattle to the district line, hand them over to the free black woman who would then herd them back into the pen. Sound pretty crazy, didn't it? What's more, it couldn't work that way because the farm was one that had been functioning for years with people on both sides of the district line and the Maryland line and the young ladies in fact continued to work that way. So eventually they were able to convince the commissioners on December 30th, 1862, that they were entitled to their freedom. So picture this timeline. April 16th, the Emancipation Law becomes effective. The buds of the springtime, which is beginning to show, nothing happens through the rest of the springtime because McCormick had until mid-July to eat and submit papers. Mid-summer comes, the crops are coming mature, they're starting to harvest the crops, they're going back to the farmhouse and they're shelling beans with McCormick's wife. Then the fall comes and the leaves begin to change colors. They're still enslaved, six months after the law takes effect but they have the option to submit the petition, which they do. And then it takes several months for that petition process to work its way through. So from beginning to end, it's an entire agricultural season. By December 30th, there wasn't a living thing left on the farm. So what we think of in a chronological timeline as an action that happened on April 16th, in fact, took the better part of eight months to play out in the lives of those who were affected by it. So no simple timeline can tell that story and that's part of what I'm trying to get at in this book. Now we can talk a bit more about this in the question and answer period too because this is apart from being a beautiful picture, kind of gets at some of the illusions that I was talking about. So the picture does correctly portray the kind of rocky road to freedom that many enslaved people had to walk along to escape. And the sense of uncertainty obviously is well depicted as well. But take a look at this. From here down into the distance, the road seems to straighten out a bit and they don't appear to be the rocks and whatnot along the way. And though you cannot see it very well, this is a US flag back there in the distance and what's the outline of a US military outpost. So Theodore Kaufman who was a very famous 19th century artist, depicted this kind of rocky road to freedom which nonetheless then smoothed out a bit. And hopefully the destination would be the outpost of the federal forces where the US flag and military force would help to protect freedom. But as I think you've gotten from what I've said before, the rocky road didn't end there and there were a lot of pitfalls along the way. In fact, even after those would have arrived there at the federal outpost under the US flag. So freedom retained this kind of illusory character right through the war and in fact after. So I'd like to simply close by saying the work of transforming illusions of emancipation into real life freedom and equality remains to be done. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War. Thank you very much for your attention. So let's have some questions. If you don't mind stepping to the aisles, there are microphones there so we can record your questions as well. I was curious, how many people in here have read Slavery by Another Name? If you haven't read Slavery by Another Name, please read it. It's a Pulitzer Prize winning book and it's about how slavery existed in America on up into the 20th century. And there are multi, multi, multi layers of how it was done in the mines, in the agricultural farms all throughout the South. Every state in the South had slavery on up until to some form peonage up until the early 20th century. And the saddest thing was is that the North did basically nothing. Teddy Roosevelt, we sent down investigators and we had trials and everything, but we pretty much were afraid of getting involved in the Southern way of doing things. And the Supreme Court law, which was passed in 1883, allowed this to happen. Basically the Southerners went before the courts and they justified basically their degree of slavery through the law and everybody was involved in it, the justices of the peace, the sheriffs. So my question is, I mean, slavery existed on up until the early 20th century and part of it is, I think all of our faults because some part of the slavery occurred quite a bit of occurred in Alabama which was the number world's producer of iron ore. So we all used it. So my question is in your great research of slavery in America and how have you investigated how the South used the 1883 Supreme Court ruling justifying enslaved peonage of hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who were illiterate, who didn't know what they, unfortunately, they weren't allowed to be well educated and that's how they were involved and put in situations where they were basically were situations in slavery practically because they were brutally, brutally, brutally, brutally treated. And I think that's something that you can talk about. I'm not gonna deal with the peonage part in part because we've got an expert on that subject in the house here and the person of Pete Daniel who wrote the definitive study of that some years ago so perhaps you could talk with him afterward about that but in response to your more general question though I think part of this lies in that timeline that I referenced from the very beginning that looks essentially at the actions of either President Lincoln or of Congress, many of those actions of which are laws or amendments to the Constitution. Please remember that the 13th amendment which abolished slavery said simply that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude is permissible in the United States. It didn't say what freedom consisted of at all and so part of what I was getting at earlier is that the official actions may say certain things. It banned slavery so no longer could human beings be bought and sold but it said nothing about discrimination. It said nothing about those who were convicted for crimes for which they were found guilty. Well I'm not gonna get into arguments about individual cases but the 13th amendment does permit involuntary servitude for persons who are convicted of crimes and so that was the loophole in effect that remains alive today. So activists today are reexamining the 13th amendment for exactly that implication in terms of what's practically the enslaved laborer of persons who are held in custody. Now another piece to this I just want to add that I think will help to illuminate this. I'm sure you're all familiar with the name of Brian Stevenson who's the director of the Equal Justice Initiative and he's the moving spirit behind the Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum that opened last year in Montgomery, Alabama. Here's what he said about the 13th amendment recently in the New York Times Magazine. When you look at the 13th amendment which talks about ending forced labor it says nothing about ending this narrative of racial differences. Slavery didn't end in 1865, it just evolved. So if we take that as an accurate description of what's happened since 1865 I think it provides a starting point for addressing your question, maybe not answering it but at least getting into it. Yes, ma'am. Yes, thank you for your presentation. My question is in your overall presentation you cited Frederick Douglass several times. With regards to the statue of Lincoln and the kneeling enslaved man can you speak to the backstory or what does your research tell you about the backstory about that statue? Because as I understand there was another minister in the community who was, or there was a community effort and a lot of debate over what this statue would look like. Several formerly enslaved peoples had donated money, some of their earnings to the erection and to the cost of this statue. And I think that in many cases those people go sort of unnamed in these larger narratives but they in fact really underscore how they were actors and agents and involved in sort of battling for artistic images that would represent post emancipation as well as, and there were all other types of actions and community events that happened around this particular piece of public art. Yes, there is quite a backstory. You are aware as your question suggested that it was largely donations made by African-Americans that financed the construction of this statue. Now those donations worked their way to a committee of folk who commissioned Thomas Ball to construct this statue to make the clay model and then to cast it. Thomas Ball claimed that he made a roughed version of this in plaster soon after Lincoln's assassination. So in his mind that was the event that he was commemorating. But as time came closer to the unveiling of the statue and person saw some of what the studies were that upon which he was gonna base the actual cast, there was a man by the name of Elliot from Missouri who was very critically involved in that planning process. He knew Archer Alexander, in fact, he had helped Alexander become free during the Civil War. So he persuaded Ball to use the likeness of Alexander. So his face and his physique is essentially that of Alexander. And he insisted that Ball have Alexander at least appearing to be rising. So in some of the earlier studies Ball was more suppliant I guess is the word and a supplicant sort of posture. So they managed to convince Ball to have Alexander rising as though he's standing up toward freedom. But nonetheless, the African Americans who contributed to financing the statue had very little direct influence in either the composition of it, certainly not stylistic elements for example, the clothing on Alexander as compared to the clothing on Lincoln. So there was not that sort of input into the finished product that certainly they would have liked. Okay, but the plaque on the monument does recognize the fact that the contributions of African Americans made the statue possible. Well, I'll have to go see it. I actually haven't seen it in person and now I'm encouraged. Yes sir. My question is about the status of the emancipated or manumitted slave. Anciently in Greece, once a slave was freed he was not generally permitted to become a citizen. Anciently in Rome, a freed slave became a citizen but the freed slaves' rights were limited or defined by particular statuettes. The American situation of slavery was based off these ancient models, right? And their diminishing status was the greatest. Diminishio Maximus, I think is what it's called in the 12 Tables. But the purpose for emancipating or manumitting the slave was never to allow them to become a citizen of the country. In a court case, Brian versus Walton, they talk about the status of the manumitted. And what happens is you become not a slave but not a citizen in this middle position, medic or libertas. And so it seems like in America they base their emancipation off the ancient, right? In America, the freed slaves have the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. These are statuettes that are supposed to be, you know, resemble what the rights or the constitutional rights for these particular people. And so what I'm starting to understand in my research of history is that freedom, this brand of freedom may be worse than slavery. The last sentence in the brand versus Walton, he says, one thing I'm quite certain is that whether freedom in Africa be a reality for the colored man and his children or not. In the United States, whether slaveholding or non-slaveholding, it is worse than slavery itself. And even Frederick Douglass in a speech, 1888 in Washington, DC about emancipation, he said that he denounced emancipation for being a tremendous fraud, a fraud on the former slaves, a fraud on the country and a fraud on the world. And so I would like you to speak to what is the status of the emancipated? Is it citizenship? And is these reconstruction amendments really a con to present America as a different country than a slaveholding country? Like we got rid of slavery through the 13th when really we just changed the word from slavery to prisoner. The 14th was supposed to give everybody citizenship, but yet we don't live in that country. Immediately after the 14th Amendment, we had the black codes and Jim Crow, which are new laws for a different status of people when you already had laws for the citizens, your comments. Okay, I mean, that's the question of the 21st century, I think. And it's one that I'm trying to wrestle with throughout the book as indeed were the people who lived through the experience that I'm describing. There was no guarantee of citizenship as packaged together with freedom. And even in terms that I quoted the 13th Amendment, all it does is say slavery is not permitted. It doesn't say that the formerly enslaved people will be citizens. It doesn't say that they'll be anything, right? So that's one of the drawbacks of looking at that kind of linear chronology that depends upon presidential actions and laws of Congress, because it doesn't get at the complexity of the matter, nor does it help to resolve some of the issues that you're raising. I would say this though, remember what Doug was said about the soldier who had the US on his buckle? He would fight for citizenship, and indeed that's what happened. And Northern African Americans had a recollection of what they termed gradual emancipation that had occurred earlier in the 19th century before the start of the Civil War, which did not produce citizenship for them. And so those who looked back on that history and who either enlisted in the Army or wrote letters to congressmen or wrote letters to their local newspaper or became active in raising funds to help relieve some of the suffering or the contraband, they insisted all along that the end of slavery had to bring full citizenship to African Americans. But it didn't happen then, and as you're suggesting, it's still not complete today. So that's a process that we're still living through as a nation and in fact as a world. And so think again in terms of timelines, it's not a linear march from slavery to freedom and full citizenship. It's perhaps looping back in some respects, but it remains one of, it remains an issue of constant vigilance, doesn't it? And each generation has to commit itself once again to struggling for what we and our sacred documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution describe as a republic made up of equal citizens. So work is still to be done. Okay, thank you very much, everybody. It's been a pleasure.