As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not
merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in
April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military
action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation
necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose
implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did
not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the
enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly.
In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era,
Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals'
sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants
and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its
unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits,
causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the
experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of
emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of
even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle
for freedom would result in victory.