cohen-lack1992

@Article{ cohenlack1992,
	author = {Nancy Cohen-Lack},
	title = {A Struggle for Sovereignty: National Consolidation, Emancipation, and Free Labor in {T}exas, 1865},
	journal = {Journal of Southern History},
	volume = 58,
	number = 1,
	month = {February},
	pages = {57--89},
	year = 1992,
}

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2210475

Much of the article foreshadows arguments of Stanley about how Northern Republicans equated freedom with contract, leading to a “contradictory and ambiguous” form of freedom. Bureau officers in Texas tried to establish national sovereignty in Texas, thereby undermining slaveholder sovereignty. But in doing so they also privileged military security and the maintenance of the cotton economy over the interests of freed people in independence, land, and family reconstitution. There is good evidence throughout that planters resisted emancipation with violence, and that Christmastime rumors of insurrection or land redistribution were present in Texas by fall 1865 as well.

p. 64 speculates that “the slaves of Texas did not require an official edict to comprehend the liberatory mission of the advancing Union army” and that slaves had overheard masters talking before. She provides a few bits of anecdotal evidence of runaways to Union lines prior to Juneteenth but not a lot. And notes that those who did reach Union lines often impressed into military service, not really freed.

p. 66 also notes that the “absence of military operations on Texas soil” in some ways spared slaves there of the war’s “physical impact” on land, health, etc.

p. 70: evidence of freedpeople being purchased as late as summer of 1865