Foner begins with the colonial era, when the Puritans believed that liberty was rooted in voluntary submission to God and civil authorities, and consisted only in the right to do good. John Locke, too, would argue that liberty did not consist of the lack of restraint, but of "a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power." Foner reveals the ideological conflicts that lay at the heart of the American Revolution and the Civil War, the shifts in thought about what freedom is and to whom it should apply. Adeptly charting the major trends of 20th-century American politics--including the invocation of freedom as a call to arms in both world wars--Foner concludes by contrasting the two prevalent movements of the 1990s: the liberal articulation of freedom, grounded in Johnson's Great Society and the rhetoric of the New Left, as the provision of civil rights and economic opportunity for all citizens, and the conservative vision, perhaps most fully realized during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, of a free-market economy and decentralized political power. The Story of American Freedom is a sweeping synthesis, delivered in clearheaded language that makes the ongoing nature of the American dream accessible to all readers. --Ron Hogan
]]>History has become a matter of public controversy, as Americans clash over such things as museum presentations, the flying of the Confederate flag, and reparations for slavery. So whose history is being written? Who owns it?
Eric Foner answers these and other questions about the historian’s relationship to the world of the past and future in this provocative, even controversial, study of the reasons we care about history—or should.
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<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr valign="top"> <td width="80%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1787 <td width="15%"> <td width="75%">The United States Constitution is ratified, containing several protections for slavery, including the Fugitive Slave Clause, three-fifths clause, and a cause prohibiting the abolition of the slave trade from Africa before 1808. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1829-31 <td width="15%"> <td width="75%">Publication of Appeal ... to the Coloured Citizens of the World by David Walker and The Liberator, a weekly newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, marks the emergence of a new, militant abolitionist movement. <td width="20%"><table width="205" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> 
<tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">Diagram of a slave ship from an 1808 report <tr valign="top"> <td width="80%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1831 <td width="15%">August 22 <td width="75%">Nat Turner launches a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, resulting in the deaths of 55 whites persons before the uprising is crushed. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1846 <td width="15%">August <td width="75%">Congress adjourns after intense sectional debate over the Wilmot Proviso, a proposal to prohibit slavery in all territory acquired in the Mexican-American War. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1860 <td width="15%">November 6 <td width="75%">Election of Abraham Lincoln as president, representing the anti-slavery Republican Party <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1861 <td width="15%">February 4 <td width="75%">Seven seceded southern states form the Confederate States of America <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">April 12 <td width="75%">The Confederate attack on South Carolina's Fort Sumter begins the Civil War. <td width="20%"><table width="205" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> 
<tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">A woodcut published in an 1831 account of the Nat Turner uprising <tr valign="top"> <td width="80%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">May 24 <td width="75%">Gen. Benjamin F. Butler declares fugitive slaves at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, "contraband of war," who will not be returned to their owners. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">August 6 <td width="75%">First Confiscation Act provides for the emancipation of slaves employed as laborers by the Confederate army. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1862 <td width="15%">April 16 <td width="75%">Congress abolishes slavery in the District of Columbia with compensation to loyal owners, and also appropriates funds for "colonization" of freed slaves outside the United States. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">July 17 <td width="75%">Second Confiscation Act frees slaves of disloyal owners. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">September 22 <td width="75%">Five days after the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln issues the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which warns the South that if the rebellion has not ended by January 1, he will emancipate the slaves. It also promises aid to states that adopt plans for gradual, compensated emancipation and refers to colonization of freed people outside the country. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1863 <td width="15%">January 1 <td width="75%">Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in areas under Confederate control. It exempts Tennessee and parts of Louisiana and Virginia and does not apply to the border states, and also authorizes the enlistment of black soldiers. <td width="20%"><table width="205" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> 
<tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">"Contrabands" in Cumberland Landing, Virginia, May 1862 <tr valign="top"> <td width="80%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">July 30 <td width="75%">Lincoln insists black Union soldiers captured by the Confederate army be treated as prisoners of war, not escaped slaves as Confederate president Jefferson Davis has threatened. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">December 8 <td width="75%">Lincoln issues the Proclamation of Amnesty of Reconstruction, offering a pardon and restoration of property (except slave property) to Confederates who take an oath of allegiance to the Union. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1864 <td width="15%">September 5 <td width="75%">New constitution of Louisiana abolishes slavery; new constitutions in Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee follow suit in the next six months. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">November 8 <td width="75%">Lincoln reelected as president. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">January 16 <td width="75%">Gen. William T. Sherman issues Special Field Order 15, setting aside land in coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for settlement by black families in 40-acre plots. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">March 3 <td width="75%">Congress orders emancipation of wives and children of black soldiers. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">March 13 <td width="75%">Confederate Congress authorizes enlistment of black soldiers. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">April 11 <td width="75%">In the last speech before his death, two days after Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox, Lincoln favors limited black suffrage in the South. <td width="20%"><table width="205" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> 
<tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln, Washington, DC <tr valign="top"> <td width="80%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">April 14 <td width="75%">Assassination of Lincoln. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%"> <td width="15%">December 18 <td width="75%">Ratification of the 13th Amendment irrevocably abolishes slavery throughout the United States. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1866 <td width="15%">April 9 <td width="75%">Over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, establishing citizenship of black Americans and requiring that they be accorded equality before the law, principles later written into the Constitution in the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. <td width="20%"><table width="205" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> 
<tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">John Wilkes Booth assassinates Lincoln, April 1865 <tr valign="top"> <td width="80%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1867 <td width="15%">March 2 <td width="75%">Congress passes the Reconstruction Act, again over President Johnson's veto, extending the right to vote to black men in the South and inaugurating the era of Radical Reconstruction, America's first experiment in interracial democracy. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="10%">1877 <td width="15%">February <td width="75%">After intense bargaining to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876, Democrats agree to recognize Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president, and Hayes agrees to end federal support for remaining Reconstruction governments. <td width="20%"><table width="205" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> 
<tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">A March 1867 cartoon, following the passage of the Reconstruction Act, shows President Johnson and his southern allies angrily watching African Americans vote.
Nothing But Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government and the imposition of a system of forced labor; the British Caribbean, where the colonial government oversaw an orderly transition from slavery to the creation of an almost totally dependent work force; and early twentieth-century southern and eastern Africa, where a self-sufficient peasantry was dispossessed in order to create a dependent black work force. Measuring the progress of freedmen in the post--Civil War South against that of freedmen in other recently emancipated societies, Foner reveals Reconstruction to have been, despite its failings, a unique and dramatic experiment in interracial democracy in the aftermath of slavery. Steven Hahn's timely new foreword places Foner's analysis in the context of recent scholarship and assesses its enduring impact in the twenty-first century.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
"Nothing But Freedom explodes conventional wisdom and exemplifies how we might better understand class conflict in American history."--Village Voice Literary Supplement
"Elegant and tightly argued. . . . Along the way, Foner provides us with fascinating insights into the relatively neglected debates over fencing laws and hunting and fishing rights in the postemancipation South, and into the solidarity of the low-country black community."--Times Literary Supplement "Foner's main concern is to delineate the ways in which the newly emancipated slaves endeavored to buttress the formal freedom they had attained with the substance of political and economic power. He brings to this task both a sophisticated conceptual framework rooted in class analysis and a meticulous respect for the complexity, integrity, and independence of the past."--The Nation "This enlightening study exposes the roots of slavery in economics and human greed."--Publishers Weekly
"Nothing But Freedom is a convincingly argued, well-researched essay that should command the attention of all students of the nineteenth-century South."--Georgia Historical Quarterly
"Erudite yet readable, concise yet profound, Nothing But Freedom offers something to satisfy every reader's interests."--Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
"Compact and smartly conceptualized study."--American Historical Review
"Foner covers this complicated story well on all levels in all locales."--Kirkus Reviews
"Foner's thorough command of sources, his lucid prose, and his expertise in American political and labor ideology combine here to demonstrate the intimate connection between the economy and the polity during Reconstruction."--North Carolina Historical Review
168 pages, 1 Map, 5.5 x 8.5
]]>In 1876 the abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed, "No man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln." Undeterred, the contributors to Our Lincoln believe it is possible even now, especially if the starting point is the interaction between the life and the times.
Several of these original essays focus on Lincoln's leadership as president and commander in chief. James M. McPherson examines Lincoln's deft navigation of the crosscurrents of politics and wartime strategy. Sean Wilentz assesses Lincoln's evolving position in the context of party politics. On slavery and race, Eric Foner writes of Lincoln and the movement to colonize emancipated slaves outside the United States. James Oakes considers Lincoln's views on race and citizenship. There are also brilliant essays on Lincoln's literary style, religious beliefs, and family life. The Lincoln who emerges is a man of his time, yet able to transcend and transform it—a reasonable measure of greatness.]]>