On The Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia

by Clarence L. Mohr

Overview

In this enlightening study, Clarence L. Mohr follows the demise of chattel slavery in one state of the Confederate South. Like the slavery regime itself, Mohr’s story is biracial in character, embracing the perspectives of both blacks and whites as they struggled to comprehend the approach of black freedom within a framework of attitudes and assumptions shaped by decades of mutual exposure to Georgia’s peculiar institution. By exploring in detail the changing patterns of black-white interaction that preceded legal emancipation in 1865, On the Threshold of Freedom defines central tendencies within Georgia slavery and suggests important links between antebellum life and the events of early Reconstruction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807126912
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2001
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Clarence L. Mohr, former chair of the department of history at the University of South Alabama, was the coauthor of Tulane: The Emergence of a Modern University, 1945–1980, and assistant editor of The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume I, 1841–1846.

Editorial Reviews

Mohr [focuses] sharply and rewardingly on Georgia’s slaves and their masters in a precisely those years that constituted a veritable hothouse for social change. Since Mohr also includes much data on free blacks and nonslaveholding whites, he actually deals with Georgia society as a whole and in a balanced, persuasive fashion that makes his study a most valuable one for southern as well as Afro-American history.

Georgia Historical Quarterly - Robert F. Durden

A complete analysis of slavery in wartime Georgia that is a valuable contribution to southern history.

Journal of Southern History

[Mohr] delineates the economic and psychological forces that transformed the antebellum South as surely as did the famous battlefield contests, and he shows that by 1864, enlightened Confederates had accepted the inevitability of slavery’s demise and were fighting for the right to deal with the joint problems of slavery and rave adjustments in their own time and on their own terms.

New York Times Book Review

Deftly combining social and intellectual, narrative and quantitative history, Mohr crafts a sensitive and imaginative story of a society accepting change to win a war against change.

American Historical Review