Review, David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (Verso, 2014)

People's Tribune, April 2015

In 1859, abolitionist John Brown was crushed in his attempt to inspire a slave insurrection. While his plan was deemed quixotic at best, most white Americans, South and North, viewed it as insane. Within three years though, Brown’s vision of freeing and arming slaves to fight for their own emancipation had become official federal policy.

As David Roediger argues in his new book, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, such rapid upending of traditional assumptions stands as an example of “revolutionary time”—“a period in which the pace of change and the possibility of freedom accelerated the very experience of time.” This process began with the actions of the slaves themselves, who greeted the coming of the Union forces by walking off plantations by the hundreds of thousands, and thus transformed the nature of the war itself from one over whether the slave states would secede from or remain in the Union, to a revolutionary war of abolition.

Observing the slaves engage in what W.E.B. DuBois called “the General Strike” reverberated throughout American life. As Roediger argues, labor and women’s rights activists drew inspiration from the slaves’ self-emancipation. “In the period that historians called Reconstruction, but liberated slaves more tellingly called Jubilee, slaves not only won their own freedom, but white workers also built an unprecedented national labor movement around the visionary demand of an eight-hour day. Women meanwhile mounted the first serious national campaign for suffrage and undertook an unprecedented public discussion of domestic violence in their own homes. These staggering developments were evidence of how beholden they were to what Karl Marx referred to in an address to US workers at the time as the ‘moral impetus … to your class movement’ flowing from the slave’s emancipation.”

Through the condescension of history, of course, we know this coalition was fleeting, but in the experiences of people living through the era it was a time when even the inconceivable—emancipation, the eight-hour workday, women’s suffrage—seemed achievable. Roediger reminds us, though, that revolutionary momentum is hard to sustain. Thus, “the backward motion of history proceeded almost as rapidly as revolutionary time had.”

The coalition created in the excitement of the General Strike disintegrated rapidly as a result of its internal divisions, greatly aided by a campaign of racial and sexual terror in the South, in which organizations like the Klan disarmed freedpeople, rendering Black militias and other self-defense organizations powerless. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, which had been founded on the ideal of free labor and reform, proved itself an unreliable defender of the rights of freedpeople, workers, or women.

Today, as forces of change are organizing on a multitude of issues, Roediger’s book serves as a useful reminder: “We cannot call revolutionary time into being, but knowing the story of Jubilee encourages us to cherish such time and the alliances of mutual interest and mutual inspiration that grew into it.”