| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Freedom's Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation. By Elizabeth Regosin. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. xiv, 239 pp. Cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-8139-2095-7. Paper, $17.50, ISBN 0-8139-2096-5.)
In this study of African Americans and the Civil War pension system, Elizabeth Regosin presents a creative and insightful analysis of how freedwomen and freedmen asserted their rights as citizens by claiming their rights to familial relationships that were recognized and supported by the government. By examining files from the pension applications made by dependent survivors of soldiers lost in the Civil War, Regosin is able to shed light on several issues. She details the complexities of enslaved families' lives, the difficulties faced by former slaves in legalizing and defining their families as they made the transition from slavery to freedom, and how the bureaucracy, which embraced traditional Western concepts of the patriarchal nuclear family as the norm, assessed the claims of former slaves that deviated from those expectations.	1
Regosin sees her study as telling two stories. The first illustrates the vision of family structure imposed upon former slaves and the way pension applicants attempted to meet those guidelines. The second uses the personal narratives of the former slaves to understand how they constructed their own identities and envisioned their relationships with family and community.	. . .

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