Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War

The triumph and travail of emancipation emerge in the words of the participants—liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and aristocrats, Northerners and Southerners. The documents reveal the active role of slaves and former slaves in escaping slavery, aiding the Union cause as laborers and soldiers, transforming the war for the Union into a war against slavery, and giving meaning to their newly won freedom in a nation wracked by warfare and political upheaval.

Available in paperback and suitable for classroom use, Free at Last includes a convenient chronology of wartime emancipation and suggestions for further reading.

Free at Last received the Lincoln Prize, which is awarded annually to the finest scholarly work on the Civil War era.

Copies of Free at Last may be purchased from your local bookstore or ordered from The New Press , 450 West 41st Street, 6th Floor New York, N.Y. 10036. Credit card orders may be placed online by telephone (1-800-233-4830) or by fax (1-212-629-8617). 571 pp.  Cloth ISBN 1-56584-015-1; paperback ISBN 1-56584-120-4.

Sample Documents from the Volume

• Maryland Fugitive Slave to His Wife, January 12, 1862
  For John Boston, the triumph of his own escape to freedom within Union lines was tainted by the resulting separation from his wife.
  [image of manuscript (62K)]
• Proclamation by the President, May 19, 1862
  After General David Hunter issued an order declaring free all the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, President Lincoln quickly overruled him and used the occasion to press his own plan for gradual emancipation with compensation to owners.
• Commander of the 5th Division of the Army of the Tennessee to a Tennessee Slaveholder, August 24, 1862
  Writing to a former West Point classmate, General William T. Sherman offered a disquisition on why he would not return fugitive slaves to their owners.
• Testimony by the Superintendent of Contrabands at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, before the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, May 9, 1863
  Captain Charles B. Wilder explained how fugitive slaves, once having escaped to Union lines, liberated fellow slaves and spread the word of freedom deep in Confederate territory.
• Commander of the District of Northeastern Louisiana to the Headquarters of the Department of the Tennessee, June 12, 1863
  A Union general described to his superiors the bloody battle of Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, the first test of combat for a brigade of newly enlisted black soldiers.
• Mother of a Northern Black Soldier to the President, July 31, 1863
  Shortly after the battle of Fort Wagner, S.C., a free-black woman whose son was in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry advised President Abraham Lincoln of his responsibility to prevent the Confederates from enslaving captured black soldiers.
  [image of manuscript (75K)]
• Massachusetts Black Corporal to the President, September 28, 1863
  On behalf of the men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, Corporal James Henry Gooding protested the injustice of the Union's paying its black soldiers—in this case, Northern free men rather than Southern ex-slaves—less than their white comrades.
• North Carolina Freedmen to the Commander of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, November 20, 1863
  Black men who had been forcibly impressed to perform military labor for the Union army addressed an indignant petition to General Benjamin F. Butler.
  [image of manuscript (69K)]
• Marriage Certificate of a Black Soldier and His Wife, December 3, 1863 [image (125K)]
  The marriage of two former slaves, Private Rufus Wright and Elisabeth Turner, was presided over by a black army chaplain, the Reverend Henry M. Turner.
• Plantation Regulations by a U.S. Treasury Agent, February 1864 [image (86K)]
  A broadside announced the rules governing the employment of black laborers on plantations in Union-occupied Louisiana.
• Maryland Slave to the President, August 25, 1864
  Maryland's exclusion from the Emancipation Proclamation left Annie Davis still a slave. Insistent on her right to freedom, she demanded that President Abraham Lincoln himself clarify her status.
  [image of manuscript (44K)]
• Missouri Black Soldier to His Enslaved Daughters, and to the Owner of One of His Daughters, September 3, 1864
  Private Spotswood Rice promised his daughters—and warned the woman who owned one of them—that their liberation was at hand.
  
• Keeper of Sandy Point Lighthouse to a Baltimore Judge, November 6, 1864
  Shortly after a new state constitution abolished slavery in Maryland, a unionist observer described the efforts of local citizens to nullify the former slaves' freedom.
• Black Residents of Nashville to the Union Convention, January 9, 1865
  In a petition to a convention of white unionists that was considering reorganization of the state government and the abolition of slavery, black Tennesseans argued that black men were fit to exercise the privileges of citizenship.
• Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities, January 12, 1865
  A Northern newspaper reported the proceedings of a remarkable gathering: At Savannah, Georgia, twenty black ministers and lay leaders joined Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General William T. Sherman to consider the future of the thousands of slaves freed by the march of Sherman's army.
• North Carolina Black Soldiers to the Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner, May or June 1865
  At the end of the war, black soldiers stationed near Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau to protest the suffering of their wives, children, and parents at a settlement on Roanoke Island, North Carolina.

Publications of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project
Other Sample Documents
Chronology of Emancipation during the Civil War
Freedmen and Southern Society Project Home Page

Last revised 15 February 2007