20150410 - Process of Emancipation

Thinking a lot today about the “process of emancipation” in preparation for the conference next month in honor of Stephanie Camp, and am trying here to put those thoughts in order.

The big argument made by downs2012 is that we need to focus on emancipation as a “process” in order to capture the continued problems faced by freedpeople in the postwar period.¹ He and Greg Downs summarize the point in a Disunion post from 2011, which was published around the time of the Beyond Freedom conference at Yale:

Asking hard questions about freedom helps scholars envision emancipation as a process rather than a shotgun moment of liberation. If understood as a practice, not a stroke of a pen, emancipation becomes a longer story, one that emphasizes the gulf between the federal government’s plans and life on the ground in the postwar South. While it is possible to define those moments through the absence of freedom, it may well be that what ex-slaves suffered from was not a lack of freedom, but a lack of power and belonging.

James Oakes, on the other hand, has pushed back against these ideas because it lessens the significance of the sharp break that came with abolition, which he thinks really was a coherent policy and, in some respects, a “shotgun moment” that coincided with the Civil War years. In oakes2013 and a Jacobin piece, he challenges Jim Downs’s idea by implying that it leads to the conclusion that “The Civil War wasn’t worth it. Instead of freedom it brought misery and repression to the former slaves. Instead of a better life, emancipation brought sickness and death to hundreds of thousands of freed people,” not to mention mass incarceration, lynching and the like.²

But in one sense, it seems like Oakes and Downs/Downs actually agree about a lot, especially the importance of what Downs/Downs call “force” and “the importance of well-functioning bureaucracies” for securing freedom. “Frameworks of defensible legal freedoms had limited meaning absent the ability to make themselves felt,” they write.³ Oakes, likewise, sees the Republican-controlled state as essential to the destruction of slavery in the South, and emphasizes the role of Union agents, soldiers, and officers in implementing Republican policy. And in the Jacobin piece linked above, his main point is similar to that of Downs/Downs: that if the abolitionists could be faulted for anything it was for failing to see how important the state was and therefore giving birth to the libertarian strain that has born fruit in “left neoliberalism.” There’s more room for agreement here, perhaps, than is typically allowed—both agree, as Greg Downs put it in his 2011 conference paper, that we can no longer “underplay the centrality of government capacity to the questions we study.”

What’s the root disagreement, then? An exchange between Oakes and Chandra Manning suggests that the difference may stem from a deeper disagreement about when slavery was “finally and fully destroyed” (Oakes says only with the Thirteenth Amendment, reflecting an emphasis on slavery as a legal institution; Manning and others imply with the Civil War, reflecting an emphasis on slavery as social system, though in her reply Manning also disclaims belief that military emancipation alone destroyed slavery), as well as a disagreement about the relationship between “emancipation” (freeing slaves) and “abolition” (ending slavery).

As Oakes put it in that exchange:

Chandra Manning appears to have more faith than I do in the efficacy of military emancipation than I do. She posits an “undeniable truth that it took armies, not policies, to crush the beast.” But by her own account, armies almost never crush the beast. Usually they unleash it. Throughout history far more people have been enslaved by war than liberated by it. Armies free slaves when armies are told to free slaves, told by policymakers. War made that policy possible, but it did not make abolition inevitable. To get slavery abolished, it took another policy.

What Oakes seems to reject most strongly in arguments like Jim Downs’s is the suggestion that the adoption of abolition as a policy (tantamount, in his mind, to the full and final destruction of slavery) is insignificant because the policy did not finally and fully destroy racism and did not ensure full equality, freedom, or security to freedpeople. The Thirteenth Amendment and abolition of slavery were significant nonetheless, even though they were not equivalent to the process of emancipation, which both predated and helped spur the policy and continued unevenly after abolition—this time as enforcement. It was still a process, Oakes might agree, but it was a process with the imprimatur of law and policy.

What underlies that point may be a deeper suggestion from Oakes that “freeing slaves” did not mean “making slaves not slaves”—only abolition could do that, in his view. What “freeing slaves” meant was to release them practically from the control of slaveholders.

Slavery was a legal institution that allowed people to be bought and sold, which depended for its practical operation on a social and political system that controlled the movements of bodies in space; perhaps one way of thinking about the process of emancipation is to note that the demise of the former did not necessarily mean the demise of the latter, or vice versa. Here the ideas of camp2004 and johnson2013 might offer a way through the tangle of disagreements about the process of emancipation by focusing attention on the systems of “containment” and “carceral space”—who had the power to control who went where—that did not entirely depend on the survival of slavery, even if the survival of slavery depended on them.

Maybe one way of reframing Greg Downs’s most recent approaches in terms of the “spatial” and “material” turn in slavery historiography is to say that the federal government really did abolish slavery but did not have the capacity to destroy the “geography of containment” (in Camp’s) terms that slaveholders had built?