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kinds of economic activity in the area. Johnson does not
explore variations within the Cotton Kingdom, either.
The result is a rather flat, uniform look at the Lower
Mississippi Valley.
A second question concerns sources. These are often
extremely selective. Few plantation papers are accessed, even though major collections exist for the Mississippi Valley. The account of planter operations rests
heavily on reformers, rather than on agricultural practice. The danger is to confuse the agenda of agricultural
reformers for the ways in which cotton planters actually
ran their plantations. Johnson also draws heavily from
slave narratives. He says in a footnote (p. 455, n. 1) that
he has “relied on the first-person narratives of people
who were enslaved elsewhere in the United States to
tell some aspects of the story.” Admittedly slave narratives are few and far between, but this strategy tends
to downplay any regional and temporal differences.
A final question concerns the language of the book.
Rhetoric often substitutes for analysis. Bodily function
imagery suffuses the book. The Cotton Kingdom rested
on many foundations, Johnson explains, one being
“blood, milk, semen, and shit” (p. 9). Excrement is a
running refrain, as is semen. The racial theorist Samuel
Cartwright is depicted estimating “the bulk of [the
slaves’] promiscuous turds” (p. 200). Johnson writes
that slaveholders often used “the women they owned to
convert their own semen into capital” (p. 196), that they
had many ways of “alienating the capacities of enslaved
human beings—the diversion of semen, ovum, and lactation” (p. 197). The effect of the constant piling on of
horrors and the shock value of the imagery could be the
reverse of the one intended. Various landscapes are
conjured—the sexual, the carceral, and a “landscapeempowered visuality of mastery” (p. 227)—but the actual landscape of the valley, a true engagement with the
environment like the one found in Christopher Morris’s
recent study of the region, is rarely invoked. Johnson’s
language is often opaque: “forced neuro-muscular
transformation created embodied knowledge” (p. 162)
refers to cotton-picking skills; “the techno-enhanced visuality of slaveholding power materialized as a boundary to enslaved mobility” (p. 225) can be translated as:
masters used print to curb slaves’ flight; “the materiality
of absolute space” is about moving goods from point A
to point B (p. 339).
River of Dark Dreams has ambition and reach. There
can be no gainsaying its three themes as central to understanding nineteenth-century America. The Cotton
Kingdom is rightly situated at the heart of wider networks of exchange. But at the same time, it is a troubling book. Its lurid imagery lingers in the mind as overdrawn, hyperbolic, and lacking in balance. Apart from
the section on imperialism, it offers a curiously static
reading of the Cotton Kingdom. Some of the major actors of the book—slaves, masters, farmers, merchants—are not captured as vividly or as fully as they
might have been. A deeper engagement with a wider
range of sources would have made it a much better
book.
PHILIP MORGAN
Johns Hopkins University
JAMES OAKES. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery
in the United States, 1861–1865. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company. 2013. Pp. xxiv, 595. $27.95.
For decades historians have discussed the process and
agents of emancipation in America. Interest in the topic
remains strong among both academics and the public as
the nation observes the 150th anniversary of the Civil
War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment. The end of slavery in America, and
the war that accomplished it, have over the years been
viewed in a variety of ways. Lincoln has been depicted
as the Great Emancipator or as a reluctant emancipator. The war has been represented as a crusade against
slavery or as a struggle purely for the preservation of
the Union, even at times as a disreputable ploy to
achieve northern commercial supremacy. In more recent years, some historians have argued that the war
was morally indefensible and its outcome not worth the
cost in lives.
James Oakes synthesizes the best of previous interpretations and offers a new framework for understanding how the institution of slavery came to an end in the
United States. Freedom National, winner of the 2013
Abraham Lincoln Prize, takes its title from the concept
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of prewar anti-slavery activists who argued that slavery
was an anomaly within American law, created by local
enactment, and tolerated by the Constitution only
within those states that maintained it. Freedom, by contrast, was national, the normal condition of all persons
under United States law and under the law of nations,
both in the federal territories and on the high seas. For
antebellum opponents of slavery, this idea was both the
philosophical basis of the national anti-slavery policies
they advocated and a program for the eventual abolition of slavery, not only in the territories but also within
the states where it was at that time protected by positive
law. Early anti-slavery stalwarts such as Salmon P.
Chase and Charles Sumner expressed the concept as
“Freedom National, Slavery Sectional.” This idea became the roadmap for the Republican Party throughout
the Civil War, in what Oakes shows to be a remarkably
steady and unanimous march toward the final destruction of slavery.
Beginning with the ratification of the Constitution in
the late 1780s, the prevailing American view regarding
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the status of slavery had been the federal consensus,
based on the assumption that the Constitution gave the
national government “no power to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed” (p. 2). Slavery
advocates consistently maintained that the federal consensus meant that the national government had no
power to do anything at all about slavery except protect
and extend it; but from the 1830s onward, slavery opponents framed the consensus as the basis of the doctrine of Freedom National. Slavery was a state institution, they agreed, but only a state institution. The
national government had no power to interfere with
slavery within a state, they frequently repeated, but it
had equally little right to protect or extend it beyond the
boundaries of such a state. Opponents of slavery hoped
that this policy could contain and ultimately strangle
slavery. They pointed out that the Constitution did not,
as slavery advocates asserted, recognize property in
slaves, but rather only a status of servitude. It presumed
a normal status of freedom for every human. With that
status established, opponents of slavery hoped to terminate the institution in one of two ways. In one scenario, the slave states—surrounded by a cordon of freedom composed of free states, free territories, a free
District of Columbia, and free oceans, and with waning
influence in the federal government—would gradually
abolish slavery of their own accord, beginning probably
with the border slave states such as Kentucky and Delaware. In the second scenario, the slave states would
rise in rebellion, start a war, and enable a victorious
national government to annihilate the institution of
slavery immediately as an act of military necessity.
With the birth of the Republican Party after 1854,
and its subsequent rapid growth in adherents and in effectiveness in asserting the Freedom National doctrine,
white southerners became alarmed and more strident.
They contended that it was no longer enough for the
federal government to leave slavery alone; now the government in Washington must actively protect the
South’s peculiar institution. This insistence on making
slavery national clashed directly with the Freedom National ideology of the Republicans and ultimately led to
secession. Throughout the secession crisis and the war
that followed, Oakes attributes great confidence to the
Republicans, arguing that such leaders as William H.
Seward were more consistent in their opposition to
slavery than historians have previously believed. Oakes
maintains that Seward was willing to compromise to
such an extent during the secession crisis because he
was confident that the national government’s application of the Freedom National doctrine would soon put
an end to slavery. The reader is tempted to suspect that
Oakes consistently underplays the difference between
partisan prognostications and confident expectations.
Because Republicans had predicted in the heat of prewar political speeches that their policies would lead to
the end of slavery, they could not, Oakes implies, have
been surprised when things actually worked out that
way. Oakes carries this argument to the point of suggesting that Lincoln was less than honest in his famous
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465
“events have controlled me” statement. Since Lincoln
and other Republicans warned that slavery would not
survive a southern rebellion, and since they had worked
diligently to destroy the peculiar institution during the
war, nothing about the course of its demise could have
been out of their control.
Oakes offers a detailed narrative of that course.
When the war broke out, many white southerners
feared that their slaves might revolt. For the most part,
that was not the case, but slaves did seek the opportunities war offered for escape. When several runaways
entered Union lines near Fort Monroe, Virginia, the
local commander, Benjamin Butler, who before the war
had been a pro-slavery Democratic politician, refused
to return them to their rebellious owner, and instead
dubbed them “contraband of war,” a term used for the
confiscated property of an enemy. Though some Republicans were uncomfortable with a term that seemed
to admit that slaves were property, Lincoln embraced
the policy of not returning runaway slaves, and for several months thereafter, Union policy was to receive but
not entice such escaping slaves from the seceded states
while still leaving slavery untouched in the loyal slave
states.
From that policy, the Republican majority in Congress, stoutly but ineffectually resisted by Democrats
but very unified within itself, advanced steadily toward
full emancipation. In 1861 Congress passed a law forbidding U.S. soldiers to return any runaway slaves and
a few weeks later began to grapple with the question of
direct military emancipation. The product of this deliberation was the First Confiscation Act, passed in August 1861. Carefully avoiding any suggestion that slaves
were property, the act, authored by Senator Lyman
Trumbull of Illinois, stated that masters forfeited their
claim to the labor of any slaves who were utilized in
support of the rebellion. In practice, it proved difficult
to determine whether any particular slave had been
used for such Confederate military projects as digging
entrenchments, and many thousands of the slaves who
flocked to Union camps had almost certainly not been
employed in that manner. In the face of this dilemma,
the War Department, in consultation with Butler and
other field commanders and quite in keeping with Lincoln’s wishes, worked out a de facto policy of accepting
as free any slaves from rebel states who came voluntarily within Union lines.
Even with this guidance, Union generals sometimes
struggled with the question of how to apply the policy
to the myriad situations they encountered. This was
particularly true in the border states, whose political
loyalties were questionable, at least at first, and whose
slaves were supposed to be left alone. Lincoln tried to
persuade border state governments to adopt voluntary
measures for phasing out slavery with federal financial
support, but met with no success. Hoping to keep emancipation on a sound legal footing, he countermanded
the overly sweeping and premature regional emancipation orders of Generals John C. Fremont and David
Hunter. Meanwhile, the steady stream of slaves escap-
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ing from bondage and taking refuge wherever Union
forces held enclaves of territory along the periphery of
the South provided both the opportunity and the pressing necessity for the government to take further legal
action toward emancipation.
Congress had already moved in this direction. In December 1861 Trumbull introduced and the Senate began to consider what was to become the Second Confiscation Act. After lengthy deliberations, both houses
passed the bill, and Lincoln signed it into law on July
17, 1862. The act, which contemporaries also called the
Emancipation Act, stipulated that all rebel masters
were to forfeit their claims to the labor of their slaves.
In order to maintain the military nature of emancipation that provided its constitutional justification, the act
specified that such emancipation would go into effect
when triggered by a formal proclamation by the president. In contrast to previous scholars, Oakes argues
that the Second Confiscation Act was neither unduly
complicated nor practically unworkable. Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation, he maintains, was merely
the implementation of the Second Confiscation Act. He
points out that many Republicans, both in and out of
government, grew impatient at Lincoln’s two-month
delay in issuing the proclamation, unaware of his intent,
at Seward’s recommendation, to await a Union battlefield victory before doing so. Oakes asserts that in thus
delaying, Lincoln was certainly not waiting for public
opinion, as a strong majority desired more prompt and
decided action. Lincoln was, according to Oakes, neither a reluctant emancipator nor the Great Emancipator of legend.
After the Emancipation Proclamation formally went
into effect on January 1, 1863, nearly two and a half
years of war remained, during which Lincoln and the
Republican Congress continued their efforts to realize
emancipation in all of the states. Congress required the
new border state of West Virginia at least to begin the
process of abolishing slavery within its boundaries, but
the other border states remained stubborn to the end.
That end came when Congress passed and the states, by
December 1865, ratified the Thirteenth Amendment,
abolishing slavery throughout the United States. Oakes
concludes with an epilogue pointing out that although
much remained to be done in the cause of black civil
rights after the war, the entire debate could not have
begun until slavery was removed.
Ultimately, events proved the Republicans partially
right and partially wrong in their beliefs concerning the
outcomes of the Freedom National doctrine. They were
right in that Freedom National provided the framework
for ending slavery in America; it did so through the second of the two means Republicans had envisioned—a
southern rebellion resulting in emancipation via war
powers. However, Republicans underestimated the tenacity with which the Confederacy would cling to life.
In Republican theory, a slave society should have collapsed quickly, weakened by the inherent inferiority of
slave labor to free labor. Instead, Southern whites clung
to the system with ferocious stubbornness and remarkable resourcefulness. This pro-slavery intransigence
was not limited to the states that had declared themselves out of the Union. The border states of Kentucky
and Delaware, which abolitionists envisioned as the
likely first converts to freedom, ended up being the last
stubborn bastions of slavery.
Freedom National provides a combination of narrative and rolling analysis of the long struggle to end slavery in America from the 1830s to the passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment, all within the framework promoted by the opponents of slavery who asserted that
freedom was the normal state of mankind. It takes new
perspectives on a number of points, and though not all
may agree with every interpretation, the perspective of
the doctrine of Freedom National offers insights that
will enhance our understanding of how slavery came to
an end in the United States.
STEVEN E. WOODWORTH
Texas Christian University
JOHN FABIAN WITT. Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in
American History. New York: Free Press. 2012. Pp. viii,
498. $32.00.
Half a century ago, the laws of war were regarded by
military historians as little more than a joke. T. Harry
Williams, for example, cultivated the anti-sentimental
and sounded as though he thought little of “humanity”
in warfare: “Eighteenth-century warfare was leisurely
and its ends were limited. It stressed maneuver rather
than battle, as was natural in an age when professional
armies were so expensive to raise and maintain that
they could not be risked unless victory was reasonably
certain. It was conducted with a measure of humanity
that caused Chesterfield to say: ‘War is pusillanimously
carried on in this degenerate age; quarter is given;
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
towns are taken and people spared; even in a storm, a
woman can hardly hope for the benefit of a rape’ ” (Why
the North Won the Civil War [1960], p. 31). Such offensive barracks-room attitudes of masculine toughness
flavored the history of the Civil War at its centennial in
the 1960s.
With the publication of John Fabian Witt’s book Lincoln’s Code, no scholar will be able to ignore the laws
of war in writing about American conflicts again. And
yet there are lingering residues of the old outlook on
history; T. Harry Williams helped inaugurate an interpretation of the war that rewarded generals and states-
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