I’ve made no attempt to write a dual biography of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, much less a study of their lives and times. Nor have I introduced readers to a newly unearthed stash of documents. At its heart this book is a close reading of the things Lincoln and Douglass had to say about slavery and race, about politics and war, and about each other. To get at their words I relied primarily on the sources whose abbreviations are listed at the front of the book. After weeks at the microfilm reels reading the newspapers Douglass published under different titles between 1848 and 1863—first The North Star, then Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and finally Frederick Douglass’ Monthly—I initially intended to cite only those articles and editorials that were most readily accessible in Philip Foner’s edition of Douglass’s writings. By the time I finished writing, however, the digital age outpaced me by making the actual newspapers more readily available than anything in print. Accessible Archives Inc. is well along the way toward putting online all the Douglass newspapers in searchable form. See www.accessible.com. The Abraham Lincoln Association has done the same for the Lincoln papers. See www.hti.umich.edu/l/lincoln. Finally, the important collections of Lincoln and Douglass papers at the Library of Congress are available at its American Memory website: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html.
Needless to say, I could not have begun to understand what either man had to say had I not also consulted the work of other scholars. But because this book is so fundamentally an examination of two men’s words, I have restricted my citations to the sources from which the words were taken and have cited secondary works only sparingly. To compensate somewhat for my minimalist notes, this essay is designed to give readers some sense of my relationship to the scholarship on which this book is based, and guide them to further explorations of the subject.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Biographies of Douglass began appearing shortly after his death in 1895, yet despite his standing as the leading African American of the nineteenth century, no one has produced a life of Douglass comparable in scope to the distinguished multivolume biographies of Booker T. Washington by Louis Harlan or W. E. B. DuBois by David Levering Lewis. The starting place for modern biographies of Douglass is Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (1948). Philip Foner’s extensive introductions to each of the four volumes of The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass constitute a valuable political biography in their own right. Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (1980) is excellent, for both its intrepid research and its balanced judgment. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (1980), a good short biography, puts Douglass in the context of African American activism in the nineteenth century. Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1984) is an intellectual biography that highlights what Martin sees as Douglass’s lifelong struggle with his own racial identity. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989) ranges more broadly than its title suggests and offers the best coverage of Douglass’s growing Christian millennialism and his corresponding commitment to revolutionary violence. The only full-length biography is William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (1991), which probes Douglass’s inscrutable interior life more deeply than any other biography and is well written besides.
Douglass’s meetings with Lincoln are covered in Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (1963). Two good articles focus on Lincoln and Douglass: Christopher N. Breiseth, “Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: Another Debate,” Illinois State Historical Society Journal, vol. 68 (1975), and David W. Blight, “Race and Rebirth: The Relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass in Language, War, and Memory,” in his Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (2002), pp. 76–90. For a brief, accessible summation of the Lincoln and Douglass meetings, see John Stauffer, “Across the Great Divide,” Time (July 4, 2005).
Several specialized studies help locate Douglass’s ambivalent views about race, but precisely because of his ambivalence different writers see different facets of Douglass’s thought. For the broad context, see Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (2000). Where Bay focuses on popular ideas, Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (2002) explores the scientific ideas about race within and against which Douglass struggled. But sometimes Douglass rejected the category of race altogether, and this aspect of Douglass’s thought is the focus of John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002), which traces Douglass’s relationship with three like-minded radical abolitionists.
The recent emphasis on race and racial identity stands in contrast to the relative dearth of scholarship on the emergence of black politics before the Civil War. African American leaders debated fiercely among themselves about how best to wage political struggles against racial discrimination in the North and slavery in the South, but there is no full-length scholarly study of this internal debate. A good place to begin is Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (1969), one of his many path-breaking books. Two prolific communists, both committed to the primacy of the party, saw from the outset the importance of the political struggle: Philip Foner’s biographical introductions to his own edition of the Douglass papers zeroed in on the political question, prodding Douglass along his path toward the Republican Party. The first volume of Herbert Aptheker’s monumental Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (1951) traced the wider debate among northern blacks. The question of political engagement was central to Douglass’s development as an activist and goes far toward explaining the difficulty he had in staking out a stable position.
Douglass often changed his mind, he exaggerated, and he wasn’t always reliable. For an impatient historian in search of steady ideas and hard facts, this sometimes makes Douglass a frustrating subject. But for literary scholars, it makes him a rich vein to be mined for penetrating insights. More comfortable than most historians with the inconsistencies, absences, and hyperbole in his texts, literary scholars have produced some of the best work on Douglass. They read his polemics for what they were—polemical texts—not to evaluate their truth claims but to discern their rhetorical strategies. This puts literary scholars well ahead of everybody else in their sophisticated approach to the way Douglass constructed his own public image. Some of the range and depth of this scholarship can be gleaned in two impressive collections of essays: William Andrews, ed., Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (1991) and Eric Sundquist, ed., Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (1990). A high point of this body of work is Sundquist’s own book, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993). Here is an example: To validate Douglass’s autobiographical account of his years as a slave, historians and biographers have tended to emphasize the factual consistency between the 1845 Narrative and the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom. But Sundquist noticed the profound (and profoundly important) rhetorical shift from alienation to a troubled American identity between Douglass’s first and second autobiographies. Philosophers also have taken up Douglass in another useful collection of essays, Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland, eds., Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (1999). Of special note is the contribution by Charles Mills, “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent.’” Mills is critical of Douglass’s premise about an egalitarian founding (although the same principle of fundamental human equality is the unacknowledged premise of Mills’s own essay). For a more sympathetic account of Douglass’s most famous speech, see James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July Oration (2006).
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
There are dozens of Lincoln biographies, but the standard for our time has been set by David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln (1995). Of the many shorter biographies, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America by William E. Gienapp is noteworthy for its grasp of the political culture within which Lincoln emerged. Richard J. Carwardine’s Lincoln (2003) is a political biography, especially good on Lincoln’s sensitivity to public opinion. Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President is an erudite and well-written intellectual biography. Two collections of essays show how much is still to be gained by mining hitherto neglected sources on Lincoln’s life. Douglass Wilson, Lincoln before Washington (1997) traces critical aspects of Lincoln’s life prior to his presidency. Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994) reflects the author’s unparalleled mastery of the sources. Two sympathetic books cover the White House years: Philip Shaw Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1994) and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (1995).
During the 1960s Lincoln’s remarks on race (as opposed to slavery) left him open to some overly harsh criticism, which has in turn provoked some overly defensive rejoinders. The subject was broached in a measured, scholarly way by Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (1962). An uncompromising assault was launched by Lerone Bennett, Jr., first in a provocative essay in 1968 and more recently in Forced into Glory (2000). More balanced assessments came from Don E. Fehrenbacher, “Only His Stepchildren,” written in 1973 and reprinted in his Lincoln in Text and Context: Collected Essays (1987); George Frederickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” Journal of Southern History (1975). Two important essays touch on Lincoln, although they focus on prevailing racial attitudes in the North and the Republican Party: C. Vann Woodward, “The Northern Crusade Against Slavery,” in his American Counterpoint (1971); and a rejoinder of sorts in Kenneth M. Stampp, “Race, Slavery, and the Republican Party,” in his The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (1980). LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (1981) was the first book-length attempt to salvage Lincoln’s reputation on matters of race.
When the focus shifted from race to slavery, and from racial ideology to political thought, the case for Lincoln was easier to make and the literature is more balanced. A turning point in this regard was Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970), followed several years later by Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (1978). Some of the most important defenses of Lincoln have come in analyses of his speeches. The catalyst for this approach was Garry Wills’s outstanding study Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992). See also Ronald C. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (2003) and Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (2004).
Lincoln was first and foremost a politician, and the skill with which he pursued his craft has long been at the center of Lincoln scholarship. Here some of the older works are still essential. David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (1961) highlighted Lincoln’s roots in the Whig Party. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850’s (1962) traced, with characteristic precision, Lincoln’s reentry into politics in the 1850s. A useful collection by a group of master historians is Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures (1992). Until the end of his life Lincoln thought of himself as a Whig, and that background is covered extensively in Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (1999). Most of the biographies mentioned earlier speak to Lincoln’s political savvy. The most recent entry into this seemingly well-plowed field is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s engaging Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005).
The political crisis of the 1850s brought both Lincoln and Douglass into antislavery politics. David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (1976) is a subtle political history of the decade. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978) is a clever restatement of the older “revisionist” interpretation that held politicians, rather than slavery itself, responsible for the sectional crisis. For a critique of Holt, see Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980). Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (1990) is an excellent account of the Dred Scott decision and the climactic events in Kansas. Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (1992) is a good brief survey stressing the conflict over slavery.
ABOLITIONISM AND ANTISLAVERY POLITICS
The 1830s and 1840s were the heroic years of the abolitionist movement, when skilled organizers succeeded in provoking a raging political discussion of slavery at a time when most politicians wanted the subject suppressed. These were also the years of William Lloyd Garrison’s greatest influence and most important contribution. But because Lincoln was never an abolitionist, and because Frederick Douglass only entered the movement after it had already done its most important work and had splintered into competing factions, the importance of the abolitionist movement itself is somewhat slighted in this book. Readers seeking a broader view can begin with several good surveys. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (1933) was eccentric and unbalanced even when it was published, but it was also shrewd, lively, and well-researched, and it has an excellent account of the campaign to flood Congress with antislavery petitions. Barnes deliberately understated Garrison’s importance to the early movement, and he paid no attention at all to black abolitionists. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (1969) corrected for this deficiency. Subsequent surveys are friendlier to Garrison and more attuned to the role of African Americans. See in particular two books by Merton Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (1973) and Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and their Allies, 1619–1865 (1990). The best brief analysis of abolitionism is James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, 2d. ed. (1996). An earlier work, James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: The Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1963) showed that abolitionists remained active during and after the Civil War. McPherson’s book was one indication of how the civil rights movement of the sixties inspired a new generation of scholarship on abolitionism. Three anthologies demonstrate what has and has not changed since then: Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (1965); Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Abolitionists (1979); and Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (2006).
The trips Garrison and Douglass took to Great Britain as emissaries of American abolitionism are only one indication of the transatlantic aspect of antebellum reform. As far back as the 1930s, Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse was attuned to the significance of British developments. But the level of discussion rose several notches with the publication of David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1974) and the subsequent debate it provoked. For the debate, see Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (1992). The most thorough comparative treatment, with a similar theme, is Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848 (1988). The emphasis on the bourgeois origins of the antislavery movement is one indication of a wider shift toward a broader study of middle-class reform. An exemplar of this literature is Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (1989). Two fine surveys of the reform movement are Ronald Walters, American Reformers (1978) and Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling (1994).
Garrison and the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement were a force unto themselves and so demand some consideration of their own. John L. Thomas, The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison: A Biography (1963) set a very high standard for subsequent work. Thomas was sympathetic to abolitionism but critical of Garrison’s arrogance and disdain for politics. Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (1969), responded with a sharply reasoned, well-researched, but not entirely persuasive defense of Garrison. His stance, Kraditor said, made sense given the thoroughly proslavery and racist consensus of American society. At issue is whether that stance, which made a great deal of sense in 1835, was still viable in 1855. James Brewer Stewart’s brief William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (1992) gives full credit to Garrison’s role in bringing about a change that he himself had trouble adapting to until the very eve of the Civil War. Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrision and the Abolition of Slavery (1998) is a work of prodigious research but limited critical distance.
One of the dilemmas facing historians of abolitionism is the fact that by the middle of the 1850s most abolitionists were Republicans. Because the antislavery movement merged into antislavery politics it is not easy to trace a continuous history of abolitionism as such up to the Civil War. Because Garrison resisted active political engagement for so long, he stands out in the 1850s and students of the movement find it hard to take their eyes off him, even as they acknowledge how marginal he had become. There is a tendency to equate “abolitionism” with “Garrison,” especially in later years. It’s a difficult trap to avoid and I don’t think I myself have completely avoided it. At times I speak of “abolitionists” when I mean only Garrison and his followers, losing sight of the fact that most abolitionists had moved into the Republican Party. All the more reason, then, to balance the history of abolitionists with the history of antislavery politics.
The outstanding study of the rise of antislavery politics is Richard Sewall, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States (1976). Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970), gives full attention to the place of abolitionists within the new Republican Party. On the origins of antislavery politics, William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (1977) is superb. More recently Jonathan H. Earle upgrades the reputation of the Free Soilers in Jacksonian Antislavery & the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (2004). Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) develops a similar theme by way of a magisterial survey of early American political history. William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (1987) is comprehensive. On the Democratic Party nothing has yet replaced Roy Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (1962). Two essential monographs are Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1983) and Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (2001). The standard biography of Lincoln’s great rival is Robert W. Johannsen, Steven A. Douglas (1973).
CIVIL WAR AND EMANCIPATION
Because emancipation was so closely tied to the fortunes of the Union Army, the military history of the Civil War is an essential starting point. Long ago Bruce Catton made slavery and emancipation the central theme of his masterful three-volume history of the Civil War: The Coming Fury (1961), Terrible Swift Sword (1963), and Never Call Retreat (1965) collectively trace the process by which the Civil War became a social revolution and the goal of restoring the Union gave way to the goal of recreating a Union without slavery. Besides being a first-rate stylist, Catton was as astute an observer of politics and politicians as he was of soldiers and battles. But for the purely military history of the war, the battles and the generals, there is nothing quite like Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (1958–1974). Foote’s broad interpretive framework is a reiteration of the discredited “Lost Cause” explanation for Confederate defeat—the South was doomed from the start by overwhelming northern numbers—and he simply could not take slavery and African Americans seriously. But Foote was a master storyteller more than an analyst, and in the details of his battle narrative he is lucid, witty and shrewd. Those seeking a better balance of narrative and analysis, of social, political, and military history, are fortunate to have James McPherson’s modern classic, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988).
The most recent generation of military historians has proven remarkably adept at incorporating political and social history into the study of the war. The tip of this impressive iceberg is Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (1983) and, to a lesser but still impressive extent, a companion volume by Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986). A sense of how sophisticated the military history of the Civil War has become, as well as the lively debates that have ensued, can be gleaned from the following, a mere sample of the best literature: Richard M. McMurry, Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History (1989) is a well-reasoned intervention in, and introduction to, the debates over Robert E. Lee and the strategy and tactics of the Confederate armies. Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Why the Confederacy Lost (1992) has several powerful essays. Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (1995), is an erudite intellectual history of northern military policy, with full attention to the way emancipation unfolded. Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War (1997) is a spirited argument that white Confederates were united in their commitment to the southern nation. A rejoinder of sorts—though the two interpretations are ultimately compatible—is William W. Freehling’s brilliant The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (2001). Jeffry D. Wert, The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac (2005) updates Bruce Catton’s older pioneering history of the Union’s troubled army in the eastern theater. For further reading, several of the essays in James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr., Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (1998) are exceptional.
On emancipation itself, the pioneer was John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (1963), which foreshadowed the social historians’ emphasis on the role the slaves themselves played in securing their freedom. Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (1979) is a beautifully evocative re-creation of the way slaves and masters experienced the transition from slavery to freedom. Litwack played down the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation and at the same time highlighted the actions the slaves themselves took to gain their freedom. This aspect of the argument soon became popular. A version of it appears, for example, in the Freehling book mentioned above. My own slant was published as James Oakes, “The Political Significance of Slave Resistance,” History Workshop (1986). Carried to one possible conclusion, the argument might suggest that the slaves freed themselves. For this tendency, see Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (1992); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet (2003). On the surface, Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (2005) is a sophisticated reworking of an interpretation made famous long ago by Frank W. Owsley. But where Owsley claimed that “states’ rights” killed the Confederacy, Robinson adds that states’ rights was born of the southern elite’s need to protect slavery at the local level. Robinson goes on to argue that various policies aimed at protecting slavery embittered southern yeomen, turned them against the war, and caused the Confederacy to collapse from within. It is this emphasis on class conflict by Robinson and others that Gallagher, cited above, seeks to rebut.
Most historians agree that black troops, largely recruited from the slave South, played an important role in Union victory and thus emancipation. On black troops, see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (1953); Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army (1956); Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (1990). Particularly important is Glatthaar’s essay “Black Glory: The African American Role in Union Victory,” in Boritt, ed., Why the Confederacy Lost. See also the chapter on “Black Liberators” in Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long.
With the recent emphasis on the slaves’ role in emancipation has come a reassertion of the criticism, first aired in late 1862, that the Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves at all because it applied only to areas beyond Union control. Richard Hofstadter’s brilliant essay “Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth,” in his American Political Tradition, and the Men Who Made It (1948) gave this old argument a new respectability. But even Hofstadter seemed to appreciate what a dead end this line of reasoning came to, since he later claimed in the very same essay that the proclamation probably made the abolition of slavery inevitable. Thus Hofstadter ended up exaggerating the proclamation’s importance almost as much as he first underestimated it. More recently the proclamation is sometimes discounted because by the time Lincoln announced it in September 1862 the slaves had allegedly sealed slavery’s fate. But claiming that the proclamation meant nothing is no more balanced than claiming it meant everything. In fact, it was a crucial turning point in a process that began perhaps two years before it was issued and did not end for two or three years after it was issued.
Dismissal of the proclamation is part of a larger critique of Lincoln for his allegedly “slow” and “grudging” acquiescence in emancipation. “Fast” and “slow” are, of course, relative terms, and as Frederick Douglass came to realize, by the standards of the American people as a whole Lincoln’s pace toward emancipation was radical and swift. That pace was set first by military events, then by political considerations, but also—and to a degree that Lincoln’s critics often lose sight of—by profound constitutional constraints. For a critical examination of the legal issues, see Louis Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865 (1973). A shift in favor of Lincoln and the Republicans is evident in two very intelligent books by Herman J. Belz, A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedmen’s Rights, 1861–1866 (1976) and Emancipation and Civil Rights (1978). See also Donald J. Nieman, Promises to Keep: African Americans and the Constitutional Order (1991) and Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001). Much more favorable to Lincoln are James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1991), an insightful collection of essays, and Allen Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004), which summarizes the legal and constitutional issues surrounding the proclamation. The title of Richard Striner’s Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery (2006) speaks for itself.
THE POSTWAR YEARS
Eric Foner’s magisterial Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988) traces the movement of the freed slaves into the social and political mainstream where they entered into contracts as free laborers and entered into politics as engaged citizens. In sharp contrast to Foner’s emphasis on revolutionary transformation, Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003) sees the freed people as a precapitalist peasantry whose strong national identity and potent separatist impulses developed during slavery and continued long after emancipation. For those who, like Frederick Douglass, believed that the enfranchisement of the former slaves was the crowning achievement of Reconstruction, the later disfranchisement of black southerners was nothing less than counterrevolution. On the destruction of the black vote in the postwar South see J. Morgan Kousser’s classic, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (1974) and Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (2001).