The Long Emancipation Quotes

“Enslaved men and women hated their confinement and sought every opportunity to break the shackles that bound them, but opposition to their own enslavement—or even the enslavement of others—did not automatically make them abolitionists. For much of their history—indeed, for much of human history—the notion of a world purged of slavery was simply unimaginable. Abolition, like any other social movement, was rooted in history and confined in time and space. Prior to the American Revolution and its ideology of universal equality, there were few movements to contemplate, let alone to join.”
― Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States

“Opposing colonization with a vengeance, black people asserted their rightful place in their American homeland. While they welcomed help from their old friends in the manumission societies, they continued to rely upon their own movement against slavery within their churches, schools, and civic associations.80 By the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the movement for universal freedom had returned to its post-Revolutionary origins. The most reliable supporters—and sometimes the only supporters—were black people, whose commitment to equality proved the surest weapon against slavery.”
― Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States

“Free blacks became subject to special punishments—incarceration or the lash—for crimes for which white people might be merely fined. In many places, they were required to carry a pass. Practices once openly accepted were now denied. Thus, black men and women who had once openly attended churches with whites found themselves barred under the false claim of “custom.” Taken together, the new systematic legal and customary constraints made a mockery of the egalitarian ideas that drove the expansion of black freedom. They left no doubt that free black people were less than “free,” as Americans understood the term. American society was governed as much by the distinction”
― Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States

“Between 1800 and 1820, the number of free blacks more than doubled, increasing to 234,000, but the number of slaves ballooned from nearly 900,000 to more than 1.5 million.76 Bearing the brunt of the collapse of egalitarianism were free people of color. Most of them were newly liberated slaves, but others had pedigrees in freedom that reached back to the seventeenth century. Since they were viewed by whites as congenitally indolent, criminal, and insurrectionary, their liberty had long been restricted; various colonies denied them the right to vote, sit on juries, testify in court, serve in the militia, and travel freely. But the colonial proscriptions were neither systematic nor complete. While most colonies denied black people the suffrage, others granted them the right to vote; while some excluded black men from the militia, others allowed them to serve; while some burdened black householders with additional taxes, others did not.”
― Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States

“The final feature of emancipation’s long history was the ubiquity of violence. The reference here is not to the great explosions that echo through American history—bleeding Kansas, John Brown’s raid, or the Civil War itself—but to the ceaseless carnage that manifested itself in every confrontation between master and slave. In the clash of powerful material interests and deeply held beliefs, slaveholders and their numerous allies did not give way easily. Beginning with abolition in the North—although this was generally described as a peaceful process imbued with the ethos of Quaker quietism and legislative and judicial activism—the movement for universal freedom was one of violent, bloody conflict that left a trail of destroyed property, broken bones, traumatized men and women, and innumerable lifeless bodies. It was manifested in direct confrontations, kidnappings, pogroms, riots, insurrections, and finally open warfare. Usually, the masters and their allies—with their monopoly on violence—perpetrated much of the carnage. To challenge that monopoly required force, often deadly force; when the opponents of slavery struck back with violence of their own, the attacks and counterattacks escalated. The pattern held in the North, where there were few slaves, and in the South, where there were many. When the Civil War arrived and the war for union became a war for freedom, violence was raised to another level, but the precedent had been long established.”
― Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States

“First, the long emancipation centered on the resolute commitment of a few men and women—most of them black slaves, along with former slaves and the descendants of slaves—to end slavery and create a slaveless world.”
― Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States

“UNDERSTANDING the destruction of slavery in the United States not as a single climactic event but as a long process that stretched across a near-century provides a useful and perhaps fuller appreciation of the reality of emancipation. Freedom’s arrival was not the work of a moment but the product of movement; it was a process, rather than an occasion.12 Taking the long view of slavery’s demise”
― Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States

“The Long Emancipation emphasizes that freedom’s arrival was the product not of a moment or a man, but of a process in which many participated—in the case of the United States, a near-century-long process. The demise of slavery was not so much a proclamation as a movement; not so much an occasion as a complex history with multiple players and narratives. Moreover, having characterized the structure of freedom’s arrival, The Long Emancipation recognizes the four elements that together are always part of the dynamic of slavery’s demise.”
― Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States