150 Years Later — What Was Revolutionary About the Emancipation Proclamation

Chris Mahin wrote this article 10 years ago, on the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Much is being said to decry the significance of the deed.  The Proclamation was a product of the time in which it was written, and so its influence and importance needs to placed within that context.  What then are the implications for today?  Surely not that we need a great leader to follow.  That might be the lesson if we took from history the idea that Lincoln, with the stroke of the pen, freed the slaves.  That isn’t what happened, and the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation need not enshrine that myth.  The issue today, the 1% vs the 99% as Occupy phrases it, is similar to the issue then, when a handful of the richest people in the United States had the right to own, as their private property, 4 million slaves.  The Proclamation was a step across a nodal line of ending a form of private property.  It raises questions about how we treat the right of billionaires today to own what should be public property.

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  People’s Tribune/Tribuno del Pueblo (Online Edition)
                  Vol. 30 No. 1/ January, 2003

                 P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL  60654
                     

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140TH ANNIVERSARY OF A REVOLUTIONARY DECREE

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION SET A PROFOUND PRECEDENT; LET’S
UTILIZE IT!

By Chris Mahin

The document makes dull reading — but it inspired millions. No music rings from its carefully constructed sentences — but it sounded the death knell of slavery. Deliberately understated in form, its content gave a bloody war a higher, more noble purpose.

Jan. 1, 2003 marks the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Much has changed in the United States since the Civil War, but the story of how the proclamation came to be issued, and what it wrought, contains important lessons for the
struggle for justice today.

Despite its dry, legalistic tone, the Emancipation Proclamation was a radical document. It declared that all persons held as slaves in states or parts of states in rebellion against the United States on Jan. 1, 1863 were free — forever. Because this step affected over 3 million people at a time when the selling price of a slave averaged $1000, the proclamation removed over $3 billion of legally obtained property from the slaveowners without any compensation whatsoever. Since slavery in the United States was an especially brutal form of capitalism, at its time the Emancipation Proclamation decreed the greatest single expropriation of capitalist private property in human history. (It retained that distinction until the Soviet Revolution).

The Emancipation Proclamation changed the course of the Civil War.In the beginning, the Lincoln government insisted that it was fighting the war because rebellious forces in most slave states had conspired to organize secession, not because those states permitted slavery within their borders. (Most supporters of the Union felt that secession was illegal, even treasonous. While many of them abhorred slavery, most felt that it was protected by the Constitution, and that as a result the federal government could not interfere with slavery in those states where it had always been legal.)

At first, the Lincoln government adhered to this policy so rigidly that it was official policy for the Union Army to return to their masters those slaves who fled to its battle lines and offered to help the Union cause. This callous obsession with the absolute letter of federal law meant that the war dragged on, casualties mounted, pro-Confederate traitors inside the Union wreaked havoc, and international support for the federal government could not be fully mobilized. Perhaps most dangerous of all, this policy prevented the Union from aiming at the secessionists’ Achilles Heel: the presence of more than 3 million slaves in Confederate territory who would act against the Confederacy if they could be sure that acting would help them win freedom.

As the bloodletting continued, and the Union suffered numerous defeats, the situation reached a crisis. Either the war could continue to be fought on the basis of the narrow legal technicalities it was begun on in April 1861 — without disturbing the property relations in the states where secession had taken place — or it could be fought in a revolutionary way. By late 1862, the Union had to face a stark fact: The only way to save the country, to stop the rebellion, would be to end slavery.

At this point, Northern society began to respond to the action of the slaves who ran away to the Union Army’s battle lines and to the heartfelt appeals of abolitionists who urged the government to adopt an openly anti-slavery policy. Slowly but surely, more and more people began to feel that if the only way to defeat the rebels was to abolish slavery, then slavery would have to go. After Union forces stopped an attempted invasion of the North by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the fall of 1862, Lincoln announced his plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

The proclamation had immediate effects. Racist whites were disgusted by it, and vowed to cease fighting for the Union. But opponents of slavery, black and white, were elated, and galvanized into action. Sympathy for the Union skyrocketed all over the world.

While the proclamation applied only to those states and parts of states in rebellion against the United States, and did not apply at all to the 800,000 slaves in those parts of the United States not in rebellion, it was a first step. Everyone understood that after Jan. 1, 1863, there was no turning back; the war was now a battle over whether slavery would exist in the United States or not. Through the telegraphic power of the grapevine, many slaves in the Confederacy soon learned that they would be free forever if they could reach Union lines.

There is a lesson in this for our time. Today — just as in late 1862 — the people of this country have to make a choice. At the beginning of the Civil War, the survival of the United States was threatened by about 475,000 slaveowners who possessed billions of dollars worth of wealth. Today, this country’s survival is threatened by a tiny class of exploiters who are also worth billions. A continuation of the rule of this class threatens America with economic disaster and moral ruin.

In fighting this tiny class of billionaires, we should build on the best in the past of this country. Exactly 140 years ago, the Emancipation Proclamation established the principle that when one section of society’s property rights destroy the human rights of millions of other people, when those property rights threaten the forward progress of society, humanity has a right to change the property relations. The Emancipation Proclamation was a public declaration that there is nothing sacred about the legally obtained private property of brutal exploiters. There are moments in history when society cannot move forward unless that property is taken away and new social relations established.

In the seven score years since Abraham Lincoln took a gold pen and signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the White House on New Year’s Day 1863, it has become fashionable in some political circles to stress what the Emancipation Proclamation did not do. But instead of disparaging the proclamation, real revolutionaries ought to squeeze every ounce of political energy possible out of the moral precedent it established. On this Emancipation Day 2003, we should honor the valiant abolitionist agitators, runaway slaves, and Union soldiers who made the Emancipation Proclamation possible — by declaring: If it was right to wrest the source of strength away from one kind of exploiter in 1863, it is right to take society away from all exploiters today!

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This article originated in the PEOPLE’S TRIBUNE/TRIBUNO DEL PUEBLO
Vol. 30 No. 1/ January, 2003; P.O. Box 3524,
Chicago, IL 60654

Liberation as Death Sentence: Health Care at the End of the Civil War

Liberation as Death Sentence

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER    Published: June 10, 2012   New York Times

When Civil War History published a paper this spring raising the conflict’s military death toll to 750,000 from 620,000, that journal’s editors called it one of the most important pieces of scholarship ever to appear in its pages.

Enlarge This Image

Richard Perry/The New York Times historian Jim Downs at Grant’s Tomb.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan/Library of Congress  Digging graves in Fredericksburg, Va.,in 1864. A million ex-slaves are said to have become sick or died after 1862.

But to Jim Downs, an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College and the author of the new book “Sick From Freedom,” issued last month by Oxford University Press, that accounting of what he calls “the largest biological crisis of the 19th century” does not go nearly far enough.

To understand the war’s scale and impact truly, Professor Downs argues, historians have to look beyond military casualties and consider the public health crisis that faced the newly liberated slaves, who sickened and died in huge numbers in the years following Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

“We’re getting ready to celebrate 150 years of the movement from slavery to freedom,” he said in a recent interview at a cafe near his apartment in Chelsea. “But hundreds of thousands of people did not survive that movement.”

“Sick From Freedom,” at 178 pages (not counting 56 pages of tightly argued footnotes), may seem like a bantamweight in a field crowded with doorstops. But it’s already being greeted as an important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights.

“The freed people we want to see are the ones with all their belongings on the wagon, heading toward freedom,” said David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. “But the truth is, for every person making it there may have been one falling by the way.”

Professor Downs, 39, is part of a wave of scholars who are sketching out a new, darker history of emancipation, Professor Blight said, one that recognizes it as a moral watershed while acknowledging its often devastating immediate impact. And the statistics offered in “Sick from Freedom” are certainly sobering, if necessarily tentative.

At least one quarter of the four million former slaves got sick or died between 1862 and 1870, Professor Downs writes, including at least 60,000 (the actual number is probably two or three times higher, he argues) who perished in a smallpox epidemic that began in Washington and spread through the South as former slaves traveled in search of work — an epidemic that Professor Downs says he is the first to reconstruct as a national event.

Historians of the Civil War have long acknowledged that two-thirds of all military casualties came from disease rather than heroic battle. But they have been more reluctant to dwell on the high number of newly emancipated slaves that fell prey to disease, dismissing earlier accounts as propaganda generated by racist 19th-century doctors and early-20th-century scholars bent on arguing that blacks were biologically inferior and unsuited to full political rights.

Instead, historians who came of age during the civil rights movement emphasized ways in which the former slaves asserted their agency, playing as important a role in their own liberation as Lincoln or the Union army.

“For so long, people were afraid to talk about freed people’s health,” Professor Downs said. “They wanted to talk about agency. But if you have smallpox, you don’t have agency. You can’t even get out of bed.”

Professor Downs first became interested in the health of newly liberated slaves when he was a graduate student at Columbia University with a job as a research assistant in the papers of Harriet Jacobs, the author of the 1861 autobiography “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and a vivid chronicler of the often abysmal conditions in the “contraband camps” where escaped slaves congregated during the war and in settlements of freed people more generally after it. The papers were full of heart-wrenching encounters with sick and dying freed people — references that he noticed were strikingly absent in recent scholarship.

As he developed the topic into his dissertation, Professor Downs recalls sparring with his adviser, Eric Foner, the author of the classic book “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Business, 1863-1877.”

“He would joke: ‘Look in my index. You don’t even see smallpox,’ ” Professor Downs said.

But as he sorted through the little-explored records of the medical division of the Freedmen’s Bureau and other archives, he found reams of statistical and anecdotal accounts of sick and dying freed people, whose suffering was seen by even some sympathetic Northern reformers as evidence that the race was doomed to extinction.

Meanwhile tallies of the smaller number of white smallpox victims were kept only lackadaisically and eventually crossed out all together — evidence, he argues, that officials were eager to see the outbreak as a “black epidemic” not worth bothering about. (By contrast a cholera outbreak in 1866 that mainly affected whites was vigorously combated, he notes.)

Professor Downs also found a medical system that was less concerned with healing the sick than with separating out healthy workers who could be sent back to the fields, and then closing the hospitals as quickly as possible.

In an e-mail Professor Foner praised “Sick From Freedom” as offering “a highly original perspective” that “deserves wide attention.” And Professor Downs makes no bones about wanting to place health issues at the center of multiple scholarly conversations about the war and its aftermath.

“I wanted to say, ‘You’re not allowed to do the history of labor or the history of the family or the history of citizenship unless you go through my book,’ ” he said. “I wanted to be able to tell a story about these people’s lives that wouldn’t get pushed aside as melodrama.”

He is also not shy about drawing out his work’s contemporary relevance. His dissertation included an epilogue about AIDS, another epidemic, he said, that broke out shortly after a moment of liberation (in this case of gay people), was blamed on the victims and was largely ignored by the federal government. (He dropped the point from the book, which instead ends with an epilogue showing how policies developed in the post-Civil War South were exported to the Western frontier, with similarly devastating health consequences for American Indians.)

Professor Downs also sees parallels with the current health care debate. “Freed slaves,” he writes in the book, were “the first advocates of federal health care” — a statement that could be read from the left as an example of early black political activism, or from the right as an instance of newly liberated people immediately asking for a government handout.

That second reading was one he initially worried about, Professor Downs said. But he ultimately just let the historical chips fall where they may.

“I’ve been alone with these people in the archives,” he said. “I have a responsibility to tell their stories.”

Barry Unsworth, Author of Sacred Hunger, Dies at 81 — NYT Obituary

Barry Unsworth, Writer of Historical Fiction, Dies at 81

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: June 7, 2012

Barry Unsworth, considered one of the foremost historical novelists in English, who was known for rich, densely textured fiction that conjured lost worlds — those of the Trojan War, medieval Europe and the Napoleonic age, among many others — died on June 4 in Perugia, Italy. He was 81 and had lived in the Umbria region of Italy for many years.

Jerry Bauer — The British novelist Barry Unsworth in 2003.

The cause was lung cancer, said Lois Wallace, his literary agent in the United States.

An Englishman, Mr. Unsworth won a Booker Prize in 1992 for “Sacred Hunger,” a story of avarice set amid the Atlantic slave trade of the 18th century. The award, now known as the Man Booker Prize, is considered Britain’s loftiest literary honor. (Mr. Unsworth shared it that year with Michael Ondaatje, who won for “The English Patient.”)

Writing about “Sacred Hunger” in The New York Times Book Review this year, the novelist John Vernon said:

“The novel contains a vision of hell on earth unlike any in contemporary fiction, largely because its account of the unimaginable cruelties of the slave trade is told in the well-wrought prose of an old-fashioned 19th-century novel with an omniscient narrator. The effect is uncanny: its intelligent, controlled and immensely readable sentences glow with a deathly pallor.”

Mr. Unsworth’s books, characterized by prodigious research and propulsive narrative force, have long been renowned in Britain and have gained a broad international following in the last few decades.

Among his best known — he wrote 17 novels in all — are “Stone Virgin” (1986), set in Renaissance Venice; “Losing Nelson” (1999), about a modern-day writer obsessed with the great British admiral; “The Songs of the Kings” (2003), which retells the story of the Trojan War; and, most recently, “The Quality of Mercy,” published last year, which continues the narrative of “Sacred Hunger.”

Mr. Unsworth’s work was a prolonged study of morality. To him, as he made plain in interviews, the historical novel offered a wide portal through which to observe human ethical behavior and its myriad failings as played out across any imaginable era.

His books teem with greed. Displaying visible sympathy for people oppressed by those who lust for power, Mr. Unsworth ranged — sometimes soberly, sometimes humorously — over a catalog of human depredation, which also included kidnapping (remember Helen of Troy) and murder.

Reviewers occasionally chided Mr. Unsworth for appearing to fall victim to his own exhaustive research. “Facts sometimes arrive rather awkwardly,” the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian, in an otherwise favorable review of his 2009 novel, “Land of Marvels,” about intrigue in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I.

Most critics, however, praised Mr. Unsworth’s stylish prose, rigorous fealty to detail and ability to evoke entire complex societies. As they also remarked, his books — with their evocation of mankind’s seemingly limitless capacity for immorality — were also brightly lighted windows onto our own age.

A coal miner’s son, Barry Forster Unsworth was born in Wingate, in the north of England, on Aug. 10, 1930. The first in his family to attend college, he earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester, where he studied English, in 1951.

He decided soon afterward to write short stories, but there were difficulties.

“Eudora Welty’s ‘A Curtain of Green’ had an enormous effect on me,” Mr. Unsworth told The Globe and Mail of Canada in 1995, invoking the author’s first story collection, published in 1941. “But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.”

He turned to novels, and his first, “The Partnership,” was published in 1966. It told the story of two men whose business relationship is destroyed by the erotic attraction of one to the other. Another novel from this period, “The Hide” (1970), involved a peeping Tom. Though both novels are set in contemporary England, their fascination with obsession and ruin was a harbinger of Mr. Unsworth’s later work.

Over time, Mr. Unsworth fell into the past.

“I don’t think it has been so much a choice as a sort of gradual process determined by accidents of circumstance,” he said in an interview with the online journal Littoral. “I spent most of the ’60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn.”

Mr. Unsworth’s first marriage, to Valerie Moor, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Aira; three daughters from his first marriage, Madeleine Reiss, Tania Unsworth and Thomasina Unsworth; a brother, Peter; and six grandchildren.

His other novels include two finalists for the Booker, “Morality Play” (1995), about a band of strolling actors in 14th-century Yorkshire; and “Pascali’s Island” (released in the United States in 1980 as “The Idol Hunter”), set in the early-20th-century Ottoman Empire.

Both books were made into feature films: “Pascali’s Island,” released in 1988, starred Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren; “The Reckoning” (as “Morality Play” was retitled for the screen) was released in 2003 and starred Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe.

If Mr. Unsworth’s novels about the past were veiled allegorical tales about the present, then the veil was largely ripped away, he said, during the Margaret Thatcher era.

In an interview with The Independent of London about “Sacred Hunger” in 1992 — two years after Prime Minister Thatcher left office — he made the connection explicit.

“As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies,” Mr. Unsworth said. “You couldn’t really live through the ’80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.”

John L. Dorman contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 13, 2012

An obituary on Friday about the British historical novelist Barry Unsworth, using information from his United States literary agent, misstated the day that he died. It was Monday, June 4 — not Tuesday, June 5.