Volume 55, Number 4 · March 20, 2008
They Chose Freedom
By James M. McPherson
A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
by David W. Blight
Harcourt, 307 pp., $25.00
Next to preservation of the United States as one nation, the emancipation of four million slaves and the abolition of slavery were the most important results of the Civil War. Our understanding of emancipation usually concentrates on its key documents: President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, congressional laws, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. These documents were certainly crucial: the Emancipation Proclamation promised that those who achieved freedom under its provisions would remain 'forever free'; the Thirteenth Amendment fulfilled this promise with an ironclad mandate that 'neither slavery nor involuntary servitude...shall exist within the United States.'
Review, 2733 words
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