And 20th century histories and she specializes in gender, race, and the history of the United States south. A little bit about her publications, which are multiple award winning. Her most recent book is bound in wedlock. A book about africanamericans and marriage in the 19th century. The winner of multiple awards including the joan kelly memorial prize. And a variety of other prizes. Let me also mention her first book another wonderful book about africanamerican women in the post emancipation south. So they have agreed to come here to talk with us specifically about the history of emancipation and the end of slavery during the civil war. A topic that was kind of always on peoples agenda for teaching and discussion, but was widely discussed earlier this summer on the anniversary of juneteenth. Thats what got started. It was exciting and always kind of in need of clarification. Let me just turn it over to you and just to talk about a process of wartime fpz. Thanks to all of the people out there in soom worzoom world listening and watching. I thought i would start with an overview of the process by which slavery was destroyed during the civil war. So its important to keep in mind that this process of emancipation is part of a much longer movement of resistance by africanamericans and their allies going back for centuries, but this Movement Really picked up speed in the early part of the decades of the 19th century. In an accelerated a great deal during the civil war between 1861 and 1865. So there are three things that i want to sort of emphasize about what we need to understand about this ross. How emancipation was achieved. So the first thing to understand is emancipation was not the achievement of one person alone. Emancipation was not the result of one event. Or one policy. And the third thing is that emancipation was the result of a process. A kind of traun out process, a contentious process that took place over the course of the war. So lots of people play pivotal roles in bringing about emancipation. The president abraham lincoln, commander in chief, congress, the military, civilians in the north who helped to shape public opinion, us but also africanamericans both enslaved and free. I want to particularly highlight the roles that africanamericans play. This is the group that typically gets left out of. Things that typically the kind of history that youre taught. Africanamericans made it clear from the very start of the war that they saw the war very differently from lincoln, from the other leaders on the union side for the most part because they saw it as an opportunity to end slavery. They made themselves a thorn in the sides of both the United States and the confederacy by running away from slavery whenever they could. We started to see this at the start of the war in april, but its the actions of enslaved men who live in the virginia area. Who set out the chain of events by flee iing to fortrous monroen 1862. And they ran away basically because their slave owner was planning to take them with him when he was going to fight in the war going to the battlefields in north carolina. So Benjamin Butler decided to these men as contraband of war. Which allowed them to stay at the army camp rather than send them back. But butler realized these people were being used basically to help the other side. He didnt see a reason why that should be allowed to happen. So butlers decision was cop bied by other officials, other parts of the areas where they were making progress and was eventually formalize d by congress as a policy. So wherever the union army appeared, the confederate territory, enslaved people fled. They were housed in contraband camps. They were makeshift camp sites situated next to union army camps. They provided a very important source of labor. They provided intel, information that really proved crucial to the war. Also over the course of the war, africanamericans even those who did not run away, basically started to make mischief. Many of them made mischief by being unruly, cutting down on the quality of the quantity of their work. Sometimes not working at all. So in essence, africanamericans initiated the process of their own emancipation. They forced themselves on to the National Stage by refusing to standby on the sidelines and helped to shift opinion fpz to see the necessity of having the vision that africanamericans have for seeing the war as a war. So by the time the war ended, there were 500,000 former enslaved people who had ran away, military workers, spies, scout, worked on plantations to turn into free labor. There were 186,000 or so who were served in the army, the navy, and then there were 2 to 3 million who remained on the plantations and in cities and towns as i said in some of them were basically helping to undermine the institutions where they were. So president lincoln had to be persua persuaded. We had promised at the outset not to interfere with slavery. But he was force d to see that implementing emancipation was crucial to winning the war. So by the summer of 1862, lincoln came to see emancipation in these terms. The union army was not doing as well as expected they werent winning as soundly or quickly. He understood how they werent playing by the role of military workers. There were man power needs who were not enough by soldiers. And northern opinion was also shifting. And so he came to embrace emancipation as well as he wanted to stop the possibility that europeans would side with the the confederacy and recognize them as a a legitimate break away nation. So lincoln in effect did not take the lead on the issue, but i would say he played the most important b singular role as the president and commanderinchief. He was ultimately willing to change his position as demands of the war dictated. Ill come back to that. So the second point wasnt just one person that can take credit for emancipation. Emancipation proclamation as ending slavery by itself. The federal government and Army Officials initiated several policies before the emancipation proclamation which helped to chip away at slavery as an institution. They passed legislation to free the families of black men who worked as military workers and as soldiers. It announced a major change in the objective of the war. So initially, it was a war to bring the union back together again. Now in addition it would be a war to bring down slavery. But the proclamation wasnt the universal kind of emancipation plan that most people assumed. In the Confederate States and not those living in the border states where slavery still existed but where those states have remained in the union. And tb exempted some areas controlled by the army and areas of louisiana, areas of virginia, tennessee, it estimate it is did free about 20,000 people who had already come under union control. These are people who ran away. Those working for the military. Or working on plantations that released to northern entrepreneurs. So there was kind of an inherent limitation of the emancipation proclamation. President lincoln could not force the confederates to free ebb slaved people. They had broken away. But it was important for other reasons skpil mention a few of them. It provided an open invitation for enslaved people to run away and to receive protection from the United States. And it basically authorized the enlistment of black men as soldiers. This was the thing that slave owners everywhere feared the most. Having armed sol engineers. Enslaved men be armed as soldiers. That was the most revolutionary part. And then the third point i want ed to make is that we have to think about this emancipation as a process, as i said, its a protracktive process that began at the outset of the war. It wasnt a Straight Line from slavery to freedom. There were fits and starts. There were retaliations by confederates. Not even all people on the union side supported emancipation. And so it was a process that it took awhile. It took basically working over the course of the war for emancipation to be achieved. We needed to take another step to abolish slavery. So it required that legal abolition to put the final nail in the coffin, which was done with the 13th amendment which Congress Passed in 1865 and enough states ratified it by december. So thats a long answer to your opening question. Thank you so much, professor. One of the things that we received a number of questions about were about june tooent and in relationship to your much distributed and widely praised piece in essence that ran on june nineteenth of this year. I wonder if you can talk about th that. If you could talk about that, starting with the history of it and the way what happens you talked about the movement and if we understand emancipation shifting by time. What happens if we also understand as you articulated in that piece and again in your published works if we understand emancipation has shaped geographically. June tooent is the holiday that africanamericans in texas declared because they were freed on june 19th. They began celebrating that a year later. Theres a couple key facts to keep in mind about texas. It was the last state where africanamericans gained their freedom in the civil war. It was on the western edge of the confederacy. So it was largely untouched by the army. It was by the union army. And so it was a haven for slavery. As it was deer tieruating in the confederacy. Few black soldiers came from texas. And another key is there was a violent backlash. So thats partly what caused the delay. After the war, they were attacking africanamerican who tried to claim their freedom. They lynched africanamericans. They caught them fleeing. And so the process was fiercely contested in texas. Its kind of ironic because texas didnt see a lot of action during the war. The action really heated up, oddly enough, when the war came to an end in fril. But texas slave owners were hold ing out than preponderance they thought they could sustain slavery. They were hoping to get compensa compensated. So most enslaved people were not freed. Until the army came in june and had to fight once again to put down those con fed rattles who were living in the state of texas. So i think theres this notion that africanamericans didnt get their freedom at the time of emancipation proclamation in texas and that that is what marxs whats different about them. But not very many people in the confederacy got their freedom as a result of the proclamation. So whats different is what was happening between april and june. And that there were those talluations. While the other states resigned themselves in defeat. And so africanamericans started to mark this occasion, this victory because it did take another year for them to realize their freedom in 1866. A year from when they general came into galveston and announced they were now free. So were now having conversations about confederate monuments, for example. And so one of the ways that i like to think about juneteenth is to think about it in terms of almost a kind of counter history. Because part of what those c confederate monuments represent is they were erected to reenforce a counterhistory of actually what happened in slavery and the civil war. And so africanamericans in texas were celebrating this history and their achievement. They really enemphasized the fact that this was not something that was given to them. But this was something that they fought for and they achieved. So when we think about these congressmen rations, they started in texas. They migrated to other states a as africanamericans have left texas and being celebrate d in virtually every state and even in some Foreign Countries fpz. I think another thing thats interesting about that story is that the emancipation that juneteenth commemorates is an example of that process you described at first where freedom comes to different people in the south at different points. Where are the u. S. Forces at any given time . Who is able to escape and to where . Who has power locally, whether its an occupying union, where there were no u. S. Forces until the war ended or afterward. So its interest an interesting example of that process and the variability of the process. We want to come back to some of these questions about commemoration and holidays and things like that, but before we kind of talk about that more, i want ed to ask you since your work has been so particularly important when you have written about the experiences of africanamerican women and also more recently about black families and marriage. If you could talk first of all about how the experience of wartime emancipation might have been different for women as compared to men. And maybe you can add children there if you want. And youre welcome to open the door to talking about marriage as well or deal with that in a separate question. Just to remind our people who are in attendance, feel free to use the q a button to ask questions, which well come around to in a little bit. So i guess ill start with the ways in which men stood out was in terms of the opportunities that were open to them in terms of to freedom compared to africanamerican women. So i mentioned those first right away. These were men. Interest iingly, they were motivated by the fact they were going to be separated from their families when they were run ini away. Then women and children follow them. But the men are much more welcomed in the union lines. The military officers could sort of envision what to do with the men. They could envision the kind of work. They were much more am bif lent about women. And ensure about what women could do. And they even saw women as interfering in lots of different ways. One army officer referred to them as a weight. But as a war progressed, it became clear that the labor was actually very crucial. They cooked, they cleaned, they washed, they were nurses. They did a lot of the labor on plantations. And children as well when they were old enough to perform these kinds of jobs were also very important. Some of the people tuning in may have read or heard about suzy king taylor. She was a woman who was a fugitive. Who worked as a teach. If you read her memoir in which she wrote after the civil war, its striking that shes really making a case for future generations to understand that women were important. They were brave. They were loyal. That they basically put themselves, put their bodies on the line. But in ways that were important for the war effort. And many of them were punished for take iing the stance that t did. And then i would say the bigest distinction between women and men is the fact that men were allowed to enlist. And being mt. Military came with privileges. What was really striking to me when i was doing the research for the book is noticing how quickly allies were willing to acknowledge black men as citizens because of their service. Even before they joined the military, once they were allowed to join the military. So that kind of was considered a baptism by blood where men basically literally put their bodies on the line for fight in for the United States. That put them in a different position than women. And so it was men who were considered sort of being you shallerred into freedom and citizenship. And women basically were secondary. They received their emancipation and ideas about citizenship through men. Being the wives of men. So thats a real distinction. Its important to emphasize that women saw their services as vital. And they set said things like we enter the army. So the things they were doing, they saw themselves as making vital contributions. Thanks so much. And that makes i wonder if we can bridge from that to the question that in bound and bed lock is one of the several central questions of that book. What about experience and what is it about that helped you capture that gendered experience of emancipation and bound in wedlock. Marriage reached a turning point for americans during the civil war before the war during slavery. Marriages were not legally re recognized. But its because of the federal governments interventions, outsiders coming in. Northern missionaries especially that africanamericans were sort of ushered into legal marriage. Even though what legal marriage meant in the context of the war was still murky, but they started to embrace the idea. And it grew from even the ideas within the abolition. One of the critiques after slavery was the ways in which it basically destroyed family integrity. And so they were very eager to could marriage on legal footing for africanamericans in the context of the war. When i was doing the research, i was really interested in tracing how that process was heard. And i tound what i think is the first missionary who was working who was very interested in the question of marriage and immediately started to see the value of marrying couples often in groups. Marrying couples at same time. Giving them certificates to mark their relationships as being newly sanctioned. And so the civil war starts to show us this process of africanamericans sort of adopting this practice of what was called marriage under the flag. Marrying under federal authority. And we see them on the one hand eagerly embracing a marriage, their marriages being formali formalized, but we also see resistance. For many of them, they didnt think their relationships needed to have ha a that. And so we see this process of voting and the contraband camps. We see it on the plantations. These were taken over by military officials and so on. The federal government was really interested in creating what they call free labor experiment. So putting slaves, former slaves on the process, into the process of becoming fullfledged citizens, becomeing wage workers. So they were interested in creating sort of familybased labor system. So marriage was considered the basis for organize those families along sort of the patriarch call idea. So agents saw it as a way for certain values. Men were taught to assume the roles of being the head of the household. And and basically have wives and children as their dependents. So were seeing that happen on the plantations. We a also see how the double standards about marriage because in those circumstances women are still being expected to work. So the family ideal is not being fully applied in the case of freshes. So another way a marriage takes hold is in the case of the military. So the federal government is very eager to marry men when they join the army to encourage those who already have families who already have wives to basically formalize those relationships. To remarry again under the flag. One particular man from florida who ran away to south carolina, and his wife followed behind him shortly thereafter. They were already married seven years, but when they arrived, he basically was told by his superior officer he need ed ed marry. He needed to marry and he was married there in the camp. So that was a common scene of seeing soldiers being married. And marriage was important because it gave men power. It became a way for them to advocate for their families. So women and men are in a very different position. But it aloud men to write letters to ask f