Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 Illustrated Edition

James Oakes has been probing Republican ideology and slavery in a series of articles he began publishing shortly after 'Radical and the Republican' was released. The articles were highly intellectual and thought-provoking about the Constitutional guarantees of property in man. This work is the culmination of those years.Freedom National is a magisterial study of the end of slavery as a legal institution in the United States. While many studies begin with the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment and focus on struggles between slaves and their former owners, Oakes' work differs from others by ending with the 13th Amendment and focusing on the Lincoln administration, Republican ideology, and the role of the military and runaway slaves. Oakes argues that beginning in the 1830s and 40s with the creation of a main-stream, political abolition ideology, abolitionists (and Republicans by 1860,) had recognized that the Constitution banned the Federal Government from interfering directly where slavery already existed. However, Republicans argued that wherever slavery did not already exist, freedom was the reining principle. Freedom National, Slavery Local. As such, Republicans believed they could put slavery on the course of "ultimate extinction" simply by defeating the slave power which Republicans believed artificially maintained the dying institution of slavery and by surrounding the slave states with free states.A second way of ending slavery became practical during the secession winter of 1860. States that left the union also left behind any Constitutional protections towards slavery. Republicans predicted that the slaves themselves would destroy the institution either by fleeing for freedom or through insurrection and by the summer of 1861 (only a few months after the firing on Fort Sumter) their predictions seemed to be coming true.Oakes argues that Republicans quickly realized more would have to be done to destroy slavery because -- although slaves could emancipate themselves -- the institution of slavery remained. As such, starting in August of 1861, Republicans started a process that would ultimately led to the Emancipation Proclamation and the complete legal destruction of slavery. The process was two fold, emancipate individual slaves who ran towards union lines and abolish slavery as a state institution. There was never a shift from a war for Union to a war for slavery. According to Oakes, the war was always for the restoration of the Union, but most Northerners believed from the very beginning, that slavery would have to die during that process. For Republicans, slavery and Union were linked.The book is beautifully written. The research is stunning for its scope and thoroughness. The result is a new "revisionist" history of the Civil War that challenges much of what we think about the Civil War.

Freedom National is an exhaustive study of the destruction of slavery in the United States. Author James Oakes traces the development and application of a constitutional theory of abolition that originated in Europe and England and eventually became mainstream Republican thought. Mr. Oakes then shows how this theory guided the anti-slavery actions of Republicans from the civil war to ratification of the thirteenth amendment.Mr. Oakes presents an argument originally developed by abolitionists that since our constitution is based in natural law and since holding a property in man violates natural law, that chattel slavery -- the right of property in people -- is not natural and can only exist where legislation has been passed to create it. The constitution does not do so -- it only speaks of a servile status, of "persons held in service", not of a property in people. Because the constitution does not sanction slavery, it can only exist within states that passed "positive" legislation to specifically authorize it. Hence, freedom was national and slavery was only legal locally.Most histories restate President Lincoln's promises not to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed and portray the southern states as acting rashly, but the author shows that Republican policies, based on a constitutional theory of abolition, would have created a cordon around the slave states and were intended to bring about the eventual elimination of slavery. As the author notes, "Historians often treat (Southern) rhetoric as though it were a species of hysteria...when in fact all the secessionists did was take Republicans at their word".Like many people, I have always heard two conflicting views of the Emancipation Proclamation. One is that Lincoln's proclamation (issued on Jan 1, 1863 -- 150 years ago yesterday) freed all slaves. The other view is that the proclamation didn't actually free anybody. Mr. Oakes shows that both views are wrong. Emancipation actually began in 1861 when General Butler welcomed runaway slaves (as "contrabands") at Fort Monroe. In time, using the theory of military emancipation and with the consent of congress, slaves were being freed throughout the country. Enslaved people were not waiting for proclamations -- they were freeing themselves. The view that the proclamation did not free anyone may be technically true, but is cynical; the author shows how the proclamation put enormous pressure both on the border states and areas the union already occupied to eliminate slavery on their own. The author also shows that since emancipation was a military action, Lincoln and the Republicans were afraid that the south would try to enslave black people once the war was over unless there was a constitutional ban. (Even though slavery was made illegal, the post war south was in fact able to re-implement defacto slavery. See Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.)There is a mythical view of President Lincoln as "The Great Emancipator". Mr. Oakes takes nothing away from Lincoln and his cabinet but he does an excellent job of peeling back what I've heard called the "Lincolnification" of emancipation and the destruction of slavery. There were many people involved in ending slavery in the United States but today we hear very little about most of them: abolitionist constitutional theorists who set the stage by developing the legal arguments against slavery and in support of military emancipation; the US Army which took in thousands of runaway slaves (and their families) and put them to work for the union cause; the US Congress which passed the "Confiscation Acts" that promoted freedom and authorized the President to issue the Emancipation Proclamation; and many thousands of enslaved people who risked their lives to make for Union lines, who supplied the US Army with invaluable military intelligence and who personally fought for their freedom.Mr. Oakes has taken a "deep dive" into the destruction of slavery. This is probably not a book for the casual reader, but it is excellent if you are interested in mid-19th century US history. This is really a masterful work.

i enjoyed this book and it made some good points and had good background..i found it at times difficult in style i tended to get lost or i dunno just feel uncomfortably lost..a good read however and really good for that forgotten part after the war when the real war began and is still going on..

This is an excellent study of USA history during a critical time.

This is a fantastic work on the order of Robert Caro's books about LBJ. I could never understand the exact origins of the civil war, he explains exactly what happened. He did this by going back to the original writings of the republicans before and during the war. Everybody else's explanations never made sense to me, he clears everything up and reveals what a wonderful origin the republican party had!

I would like to add my endorsement to the more learned comments already posted. In a year which will see much published about the process of emancipation, Oakes's book should strand as one of lasting importance. Elegantly written,deeply researched, and persuasively argued, this should appeal to academics and to any serious reader. It joins the recent historiographical tendency to return the abolition of slavery to the forefront of Republican policy and thus of (Civil) war aims, and makes that point amply and convincingly. Lincoln is here portrayed as far from a reluctant emancipator.This volume will be the definitive narrative of wartime emancipation as a matter of national policy, albeit somewhat more concerned with top-down policy than slave agency in the process.