Envisioning Emancipation:  
Black Americans and the End of Slavery

Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer

Temple University Press, 2013

224 pp., $35.00

Review by Gordon Berg

            Their eyes are what you notice first.  Staring deferentially or defiantly into the camera, they cry out “I am somebody.”  The stunning array of photographs gathered in this unusual book, many never before displayed publicly, are powerful images of African American life before and after the Emancipation Proclamation forever remade the United States for everyone.  

            Ms. Willis, a professor of photography and imaging, and Ms. Krauthamer, a professor of history, have admirably succeeded in their goal of depicting “ways in which black people's enslavement, emancipation, and freedom were represented, documented, debated, and asserted in a wide range of photographs from the 1850s through the 1930s.”  The photos are representative of black people enslaved and free, well-to-do and desperately poor, famous and unknown.  The medium of photography brings out the humanity inherent in all of them and demands attention from the viewer.

The narrative accompanying the photographs is as strong as the subjects it describes.  With eloquence and dignity, it places the pictures in their historical context and analyzes the meanings long hidden behind the images.  Taken together, the authors contend, the photos serve “as a type of 'family album,' allowing contemporary readers to envision a collective history that recognizes the range and complexity of the black experience in slavery and freedom.”

            The authors make a compelling case that “black Americans embraced photography not simply for its novelty or aesthetic value but for its recognized potential to present powerful social and political arguments.”  Sojourner Truth sold copies of her portrait to raise money for the abolitionist cause.  Printed on the back of every copy of Matthew Brady's famous 1863 photograph of the horribly scarred back of Private Gordon were the words “The nett proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the department of the Gulf now under the command of Maj. Gen. Banks.”   In the early twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois, the eminent sociologist and a founder of the NAACP, knew that photography could challenge racist arguments about black inferiority by depicting the refinement, respectability, and economic success of an emerging black middle class.

            The book concludes with Richard Avedon's iconic photographic portrait of William Casby.  Born a slave in Louisiana, Mr. Casby's one hundred year-old face seems to hold, forever frozen on a silver gelatin print, the trials and triumphs of an entire race.  Richard Avedon admirably captures Mr. Casby's humanity for all to see, but the proud man's memories and feelings remain hidden behind his piercing eyes.

            Envisioning Emancipation is an important contribution in the documentation of African American culture in America.  By visually capturing a moment in the lives herein portrayed, we re-imagine the mystic chords of memory linking us with our collective past, the better to understand who we are today and how we came to be this way.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

The Jackson County War:

Reconstruction and Resistance in Post-Civil War Florida

Daniel R. Weinfeld

University of Alabama Press, 2012
206 pp., $29.95

Review by Gordon Berg

            From 1869-1871, a nondescript county in the Florida panhandle became a battleground.  Its citizens terrorized each other with outbursts of brutal violence followed by anxious periods of eerie quiet.  The period became known throughout the nation as the Jackson County War because the number of murders that occurred there far outnumbered those in the rest of the state combined.

            Daniel Weinfeld has examined the causes and effects of these depredations, sometimes in almost mind-numbing detail (witness the 11-page biographical index of major figures chronicled in the book).  One can hardly blame Weinfeld, however, for his enthusiasm.  He makes excellent use of rich storehouses of primary sources including dozens of newspapers, Freedman's Bureau records, state documents, court transcripts, Congressional hearings, and collections of personal memoirs and letters.  What emerges is a saga of social upheaval, economic devastation, political chicanery, and personal animus; a toxic scenario that was repeated time and again throughout the South after the Civil War.

            Just how many people were murdered during the Jackson County War has never been definitively established.  Weinfeld correctly maintains, however, the exact number is far less important than the issues that precipitated them.  The author analyzes each in their turn.

            While the county's black politicians tended to be conservative, Weinfeld maintains that the most serious problems arose from “the impression among whites that the [black] community was organized, disciplined, and heavily armed.”  Also, a new generation of white leaders tended to come from the county's newly enriched merchants and lawyers, not the old patrician plantation elite which experienced a loss of power and prestige.  The newly empowered class “were strongly associated after the war with the Regulators” and the Ku Klux Klan.  Finally, a small but savage 1864 skirmish fought in Marianna, the county seat, continued to have repercussions between the races long after the war ended.  No other Florida county suffered so many civilian casualties or so much property damage.

             Today, there is nothing in Jackson County to memorialize the events that happened there.  Weinfeld maintains this “shames our forgetfulness.”  But as long as there are intrepid investigators like Daniel Weinfeld, the truth will out and it will set us free.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.