Is the Notion of African-American Emancipation in the Civil War a Myth?

25 Oct

By Amelia Davies, Third Year History

Legally, African-American slaves were emancipated at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1863. Yet, if we are to scratch the surface, the celebratory rhetoric that surrounds emancipation seems to mask some inconvenient truths. In this piece, The Bristorian asks whether 'emancipation' is an apt descriptor of the African-American situation post Civil War.

Emancipation is a process liberating an individual or group from legal, social, or political restrictions. African-Americans have historically been presumed to have been emancipated during the American Civil War (1861- 1865) by the ‘Great Emancipator’ Abraham Lincoln.

Nevertheless, we should consider that formal and legislative emancipation is distinct from a genuine change in practice. Indeed, ‘emancipation’ meant something different to Americans in the 1860s than it does to twenty-first century historians. Many historians today, scrutinising American history through a fuller temporal lens, are unconvinced by the concept of emancipation during the Civil War.

This is because understandings of freedom and liberty have been stretched much further in our present day to mean equality, not just the unshackling of chains. Ongoing racism throughout America since 1865 demonstrates that a document setting African-American individuals in rebellious states ‘free’ is far from proof of genuine or full emancipation. That America’s Civil Rights Movement came to a head as late as the 1960s, tells us of an America that continued to be rife with racial divisions and segregation for a century after the Emancipation Proclamation.

African-Americans had been established as lesser than white Americans through the ‘Three Fifths’ clause of the Constitution, ratified in 1789, which stated that only sixty per cent of a state’s slave population counted towards its total population. This impacted states’ representation in Congress, affording African-Americans less representation than white Americans, which illustrates their position as second-class citizens. Additionally, the lack of formal legislative protections of their labour rights furthers the perception that African-Americans were considered lesser beings.

If we are to follow E. P. Thompson’s example of rescuing ‘lost causes’ from history, we must acknowledge African-American efforts during the Civil War. For example, the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 1862, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, not only allowed African-American enlistment in the Union Army but also freed slaves in the Confederate states. African-American contributions to the Union war effort, especially in the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment of ‘Coloured Troops’, are generally accepted by historians to have been significant in enhancing the Union’s advantage over the Confederacy, and eventual victory.

However, it would be misrepresentative to suggest that the existence of agency, and the vast contributions of African-American Union soldiers, demonstrates their true emancipation.

Deeper analysis highlights the cracks in the rose-tinted portrayal of emancipation in the Civil War. Not only were African-American Union soldiers not paid or promoted on par with their white counterparts, but the Union’s enlistment of African-American soldiers was a strategic decision to increase the Union’s size advantage over the Confederacy to solidify an ‘upper hand.’ Furthermore, the Emancipation Proclamation fell short of abolishing slavery in states that were not in rebellion, another strategic decision where the fates of African-Americans depended on military necessity, not moral enlightenment.

Even more damning of the concept of Civil War era emancipation - which many today still accept as fact - is what followed. Significant was The Mississippi Black Code of 1865 which prohibited African-Americans from carrying firearms unless they were in military service. Due to the Second Amendment granting Americans the constitutional right to bear arms, it is clear that African American ‘rights’ were not enshrined as those of white Americans were. There is credit to James Brisbin’s argument that the Black Codes reduced African American individuals to a form of slavery worse than the form they had just been ‘emancipated’ from.

One only needs to look to the 1960s, the watershed decade regarding African American subjugation and segregation within America, where the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed ‘Jim Crowism’. It becomes clear that calling the Civil War the penultimate phase of emancipation for African Americans, and crediting Lincoln as the ‘Great Emancipator’, is a dismissal of ongoing suffering for African Americans within the United States.

Ultimately, the crediting of one individual, group, or era with the emancipation of African Americans fails to address emancipation’s complexity, as well as falling short of questioning the validity of emancipation as a concept.

The potency of ongoing racial discrimination throughout America since 1865 to the present day validates the contentions surrounding the notion of true emancipation. Perhaps African Americans were better placed to emancipate themselves fully during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, which oversaw the implementation of more progressive legislation. Although, the fundamental question still stands – were African Americans ever truly emancipated or liberated in America? If not, what needs to happen to facilitate this?

Is the Notion of African-American Emancipation in the Civil War a Myth?

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