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Reviews
| The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views. By Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford and Frank J. Williams. Foreword by John Hope Franklin. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 162. Illus., appendix, notes, index. Cloth, $29.95).
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The first essay in this book is "Imagined Promises, Bitter Realities," by Edna Greene Medford, Director of Graduate Studies in History, Howard University, and an authority on African Americans during and after the Civil War. From her perspective, the progress of the Union from its early guarantees not to disturb slavery in the states where it existed to gradual, partial, and general emancipation, was awkward and never complete. She juxtaposes the actual experiences of slaves seeking freedom among the increasing chaos caused by war with the administrative and legal efforts of Congress and especially President Lincoln. The president tried to save the Union at first by protecting slavery in the border states. Subsequently he proposed gradual emancipation and colonization schemes to Congress and the loyal slave states. Then as those schemes went nowhere and the military position of the Union deteriorated, he turned to the Emancipation Proclamation. As the title suggests, Medford is more impressed by the failures than by the successes of emancipation. Sometimes she paints with a broad brush: "Black men and women understood [emancipation's] revolutionary implications; white Americans, just as resolutely, determined to ascribe to it no broader meaning than release from bondage."(p. 47) The trouble with this is that it makes it appear that "white people" were all alike on the question of African American rights; if this were strictly true, there would have been no Radical Reconstruction. |
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Frank J. Williams' essay has a long title, "'Doing Less' and 'Doing More': The President and the Proclamation—Legally, Militarily, and Politically." Its greatest strength is the clarity with which Williams defines the constraints under which Lincoln had to operate, and the tactical choices he made in the first 30 months of his presidency. Along with many astute observations and definitions, the article contains the full text of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, and the operative Emancipation Proclamation January 1, 1863. There is also an unusually lucid description of the two important acts of Congress that preceded and anticipated emancipation, the First Confiscation Act of August 6, 1861, and the Second Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862. The volume's Appendix contains the full text of both. |
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Harold Holzer's contribution is strikingly original: "Picturing Freedom: The Emancipation Proclamation in Art, Iconography, and Memory." Noting that graphic celebrations of the Proclamation were relatively rare during the first two years after its promulgation, Holzer explains that following his assassination, artists, sculptors, and printers were inspired to incorporate the Proclamation in their apotheosis of Lincoln. The rise and decline of this cultural phenomenon enjoys deft description and thirty-five illustrations, nine of which were hostile to Lincoln and black Americans. Incidentally, Holzer points out that Lincoln, though generally modest in most of his utterances and actions, spent quite a lot of time posing for photographs and portraits in the latter years of his presidency. |
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This book is not quite as short as the page numbers suggest. The size is 7" × 10" and the large pages are generously filled with text or, in Holzer's case, text and illustrations. All three authors write very well, and their quite different approaches make for an unusually interesting book. |
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