Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era

by Ira Berlin

Overview

A sequel to the award-winning Free at Last that includes moving letters from freed enslaved people to their families

Drawn from the work of award-winning Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, Families and Freedom tells the story of the remaking of the black family during the tumultuous years of the Civil War era. Through the dramatic and moving letters and testimony of freed enslaved persons, the documents in Families and Freedom provide deep insight into the most intimate aspects of the transformation of captives to free people. This book is the sequel to the 1994 Lincoln Prize winner Free at Last, which was described in the New York Times as "this generation's most significant encounter with the American past."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565844407
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	08/01/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, editors of Free at Last (The New Press), teach history at the University of Maryland. They are former and present directors, respectively, of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which is compiling a multivolume documentary history of the transition from slavery to freedom.

Editorial Reviews

Berlin and Rowland are, respectively, the former and present directors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. In this sturdy sequel to Free at Last, they present documents, primarily letters written by African Americans, that illustrate the stark brutalities of slavery in the 1860s. In the border states of Missouri, Maryland and Kentucky, where slavery remained legal despite the Emancipation Proclamation, black men who had joined the Union army were often arrested by civil authorities when they went home to help their families. When blacks entered army camps, often their families occupied shanty towns nearby. Many soldiers complained to their white commanders about their families' wretched living conditions; some even wrote to President Lincoln. Letters from blacks in the North show that they endured the same problems as whites-only magnified because free blacks in the North toiled on the fringes of the economy. There's also material on the immediate postwar situation of black families. Black units remained in service as occupation troops and on the Mexican border while their loved ones at home suffered discrimination and vengeance from former slave owners. Letters describing the sudden ability of blacks to form legal marriages in the South underscore the inhuman conditions of slavery, as do the missives of those futilely searching for kin sold off years earlier. With each letter preceded by a brief explanatory note, this valuable collection of primary documents contributes to our understanding of 19th-century black social history; it also can serve as an excellent college text. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is the sixth installment of a Freedman and Southern Society-sponsored study entitled Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. The impeccable standards established by the editors in the previous works (most recently, The Slaves' Economy, International Specialized Book Svcs., 1995) are rigorously maintained in this one. The joy and horror evoked by these historical documents are certain to remain with the reader for a long time. As the title suggests, the focus here is the complex familial relations of African Americans of the time. Because family ties were discouraged if not forbidden by slavery, the concept of the extended family developed and has survived to today. Slaves, thus deprived, acquired "family" where they could. The documents presented here examine these blood and extended relationships with poignancy. This work (and the entire series preceding it) is not merely highly recommended for all public and academic libraries; it is sine qua non for even the most rudimentary American history collection.-Don R. Brusha, Sebring P.L., Fla.

Library Journal