Steven Hahn. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Cambridge
Harvard University Press, 2009. xvii + 246 pp. $21.95 (cloth),
ISBN 978-0-674-03296-5.
Reviewed by Martin Hardeman (Eastern Illinois University)
Published on H-Law (February, 2010)
Commissioned by Christopher R. Waldrep
Emancipation, Rebellion, and Self-Determination
I read and was duly impressed by Steven Hahn's 2004 Bancroft and
Pulitzer Prize-winning _A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political
Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration_.
Frankly, I expected _The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom_
(based on his 2007 Nathan I. Huggins lectures at Harvard) to be a
slightly popularized reprise. It was that, but it was also much more.
_The Political Worlds_ is a provocation and a challenge to the
American historical profession. Hahn calls on us to re-think our
periodization of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
re-analyze it from a series of new perspectives.
The book is divided into three chapters, a preface, an appendix,
fifty-six pages of notes, and an index. The first chapter, "'Slaves
at Large': The Emancipation Process and the Terrain of African
American Politics," begins with a question. If the traditional view
that there were two emancipations--one as a result of the Revolution
and the other as an integral part of the Civil War--was wrong and if
instead there was one prolonged emancipation process beginning in
1777 and ending with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment,
how would this affect the interpretation of the nation's antebellum
history?
The author concludes that conditional slavery would be a reality for
all black Americans in all parts of the nation. Even in those states
and territories where the "peculiar institution" was officially
banned, both local and federal law would make African American rights
tenuous, at best. He writes that black communities in the "free"
North would ultimately be akin to the maroon settlements in Brazil
and the Caribbean. Like them, the freedom and independence of their
inhabitants would be provisional.
And, like the provisionally free in other slave societies, the Free
Negroes of the North would also see themselves as under siege.
Virtually unprotected by the law, any white could claim them as
runaways. While the actual percentage of fugitives is unknown, Hahn
points out that according to the 1850 federal census just under 25
percent of the inhabitants of Boston, Providence, Brooklyn, and New
York City and as high as 90 percent of those in the rural counties of
southern Ohio had been born in the slave states, proportions that
generally increased over the decade. Thus, the connections between
the nominally free and actively enslaved was an unbroken chain and
its links transmitted information, aspiration, and social perception
in both directions.
The concept of a long, gradual emancipation significantly challenges
the orthodox view of both the antebellum United States and of the
Civil War. The implication of the country as a whole in slavery casts
doubt on any interpretation of an "irrepressible conflict." It
reopens questions of causality, contingency, and formal and informal
politics. It demands a re-imagining of American history, modifying
the revolutionary drama definitively ending slavery.
At the center of the second chapter, "Did We Miss the Greatest Slave
Rebellion in Modern History?" is a comparison between the actions and
attitudes of African Americans during the Civil War and French Saint
Domingue's Negroes during the Haitian Rebellion. While recognizing
their differences, Hahn notes that both began with a profound
disruption of the white elite and both ended with black men taking up
arms to successfully end the institution of slavery. Yet, what
happened and why is not the essential question. It is rather why
Americans, white and black, professional historians, and the general
populace have so absolutely rejected any idea of a slave rebellion as
a component of the Civil War.
Clearly, this was not the case, particularly for white Southerners
between 1861 and 1865. They saw slave flight, assistance to Union
raiders, and most especially enlistment in the Union forces as
manifestations of servile insurrection. But in the years following
the war, reconciliation seemed to demand a reconsideration of the
matter.
If the war really was a clash of great and noble principles, a
brothers' war with glory enough for the blue and the gray, then there
was no room left for black insurgents. In both popular literature and
historical monographs, African Americans became the comic relief with
little real agency and even less influence on the American _Iliad_.
While African Americans refused to accept the image of blacks as
passive during the war, they were equally reluctant to see themselves
or their progenitors as slave rebels. According to Hahn, they saw
African American actions and attitudes as an adherence to the
fundamental principles of American freedom, as a model of civilized
behavior, and as proof of their loyalty to the United States. At the
same time, these perceptions were part of black resistance to the
negative racial stereotypes of the white majority, a majority whose
nightmares were populated by African American men with guns.
The great exception to these "interpretive sensibilities" was W. E.
B. DuBois. Regarding African Americans in both slavery and freedom as
consequential political actors, when they had determined that the
federal army would not or could not return fugitive slaves, when they
were convinced that their masters were uncertain of victory, DuBois
concluded that African Americans acted collectively, fleeing bondage
and offering their labor and themselves to the Union.
Many of DuBois's insights have become part of the mainstream
orthodoxy over time. Yet there is still a reluctance to incorporate a
conscious slave revolt into the interpretation of the Civil War. Hahn
suggests that this reluctance is quintessentially American. A belief
in formal politics with their elections, party platforms, and
official institutions, blinds American historians to the reality and
influence of the ad hoc, grassroots politics of slaves, the poor, and
the disenfranchised.
The third chapter, "Marcus Garvey, the UNIA, and the Hidden Political
History of African Americans," presents a problem of historiography
and analysis. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was
founded in Jamaica in 1914 by Marcus Garvey. By the mid 1920s, it was
indisputably the largest mass organization in the history of the
African Diaspora. However, Hahn points out that it has received less
serious investigation than the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the black membership of the Communist
Party, or African American participation in the early
twentieth-century labor movements. His question is why.
He proposes three interrelated answers. The first and most damning is
mere laziness. Although he admits that resources on the UNIA are
relatively scarce, he condemns his fellow historians for their
failure to investigate even those resources, as well as their failure
to conduct oral interviews with surviving members of the
organization, their families, and their critics.
The second answer returns to the underlying theme of _The Political
Worlds_, the American inability to incorporate or even imagine the ad
hoc, the grassroots politics of outsiders.
The third answer is that the alternative goals of the UNIA seem so
foreign to the assimilationist mainstream that the organization is
simply dismissed. The UNIA and its followers are seen as an
aberration roughly akin to the Ghost Dances of the Plains Indians.
"Not surprisingly," Hahn writes, "many of the major historical works
on Marcus Garvey and the UNIA have been produced by scholars born and
educated in the Caribbean and Britain" (p. 161). Garvey and his
movement electrified black America during the 1920s, together with
much of the black Atlantic world. Given the numbers of those people
who identified themselves as Garveyites, Hahn concludes, "we
condescend to Garvey and the UNIA at our own loss and our peril" (p.
162).
_The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom_ is a very important
book. Steven Hahn is brash, intemperate, and critical of the American
historical profession. Occasionally, he is over the top.
Occasionally, he may be wrong. But, all of his questions are good
ones. He has spit on the ground, drawn a line in the sand, and placed
a chunk of wood on his shoulder. It is up to his fellow historians to
step up to the mark, knock the chip off his shoulder, and answer the
challenges he has proposed.
Let the best combatants win!
Citation: Martin Hardeman. Review of Hahn, Steven, _The Political
Worlds of Slavery and Freedom_. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. February, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25764
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