"There are many controversies and chronic misconceptions surrounding the idea of emancipation in the nineteenth-century United States. Much recent scholarship has sought to address these misconceptions ... Reidy further enriches and complicates our understanding of emancipation in the context of the Civil War. Drawing us back to testimonies of participants and contemporary witnesses of the era and synthesizing the perspectives of subsequent observers,...

"In the popular imagination, slavery in the United States ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation may have been limited--freeing only slaves within Confederate states who were able to make their way to Union lines--but it is nonetheless generally seen as the key moment, with Lincoln's leadership setting into motion a train of inevitable events that culminated in the passage of an outright ban: the Thirteenth Amendment....

"For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation's capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the...

For black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. In this deeply researched social history, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers analyzes the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, defined, and defended their own vision of freedom. Drawing on legislative and judicial materials, probate data, tax lists, church records, family papers, and more, Myers creates detailed portraits of...

"In the Civil War, the United States and the Confederate States of America engaged in combat to defend distinct legal regimes and the social order they embodied and protected. Depending on which side has an argument that one accepted, the Constitution either demanded the Union's continuance or allowed for its dissolution. After the war began, rival legal concepts of insurrection (a civil war within a nation) and belligerency (war between sovereign...