Hager provides an informed and informative view of writings produced by formerly enslaved African Americans, often overlooked as an illiterate group. Hager reminds readers to attend to those texts that have the power to give scholars a broader perspective of particular moments… By paying attention to these authors, Hager aims to develop new models for the interpretation of historical sources and give voice to both the unknown and the underappreciated.
Christopher Hager does a fascinating job of sifting through these letters [written by slaves], fleshing out as much as possible the stories of their authors, and casting it all as black America’s first attempts at forging a voice in this strange land, in Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing .
PopMatters - Mark Reynolds
A penetrating and revealing portrait of people in the process of defining freedom, Word by Word is a stirring, important work that reshapes our understanding of slavery and emancipation.
Hager brilliantly imagines scenes of writing among freed people in the decades immediately following emancipation, showing how former slaves turned to writing as a way of taking control of their world. Word by Word is a major and revelatory act of historical recovery done with imaginative sympathy and critical verve.
Through a series of bold, imaginative and insightful case studies, Christopher Hager uncovers the intellectual world of U.S. slavery and charts the hopes, expectations and fears of enslaved writers… By understanding emancipation as a slow process rather than a rapid transformation, Word by Word shows how literacy was an incomplete and sometimes flawed instrument of black self-determination. The idea of emancipation as an unfinished revolution is not new, nor is the attention to subterranean networks of enslaved information and exchange particularly novel in slavery studies. By rendering legible and audible the writings of the literate minority, however, Hager reveals the desperate and creative measures taken by former slaves to assert their communal and individual voices. Most of course continued unlettered, but the striking improvement in black literacy during the two decades after emancipation (from 10 to 30 per cent) is testimony to the enduring importance attached to the written word and the empowering potential of African-American writing.
Times Higher Education - Richard Follett
While Frederick Douglass invigorated abolitionists with his eloquent prose, many of his contemporaries, still enslaved or recently freed, scrawled barely legible letters to friends and family sold to distant masters. In this revelatory hybrid of history and textual analysis, Hager argues that the act of writing—often in defiance of states’ antiliteracy laws—was an exceedingly potent form of self-empowerment for these oppressed men and women, never mind their poor spelling and unorthodox methods (one potter carved poetry into his work, another “composed at the handle of the plough” and kept the lines memorized till he learned to write). Primary documents, intensely scrutinized, reveal powerful emotions and common hardships, bear witness to racial struggles across the country, and provide unalloyed insight into the stark yet hopeful reality after the Emancipation Proclamation. Particularly fascinating is the evolution of writing as a form of power: a former slave protests, via letter, to a Union general about Union soldiers attacking his neighbor’s wife, while another journals his integration into the U.S. Navy with perfunctory but increasingly assured entries. This thoughtful examination of the artifacts of a too-long-silenced population is made all the more eloquent by accompanying facsimiles of the arduously penned missives. 11 halftones. (Feb.)
Analyzing scraps of manuscripts created by blacks born into bondage in the antebellum South and freed in the era of emancipation, Hager (English & American studies, Trinity Coll., CT) seeks to craft an intellectual history of a people too often dismissed as illiterate and lacking a culture of letters. His focus is not on stars who are well known from fugitive slave narratives, but on a handful of more or less literate blacks whose previously unpublished letters provide pieces of a complex and rich narrative of liberation. Hager discusses the mental process of writing, exploring the inner lives, secrecy, and subversion shown in black initiatives to learn how to write and how to use writing to end enslavement and to embrace emancipation. Historian Carter G. Woodson's 1900 The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters During the Crisis 1800–1860 pioneered the path Hagar follows with postmodern literary analysis, which joins growing recognition of the changes to self and society that African Americans achieved by grasping the power of the written word to inscribe their freedom. VERDICT Hager's provocative work on the self-empowerment and transformation of black literacies merits reading in collections on African Americans, emancipation, literacy, and U.S. literature and intellectual history.—Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Hager (English and American Studies/Trinity Coll.) debuts with an examination of the emerging literacy of slaves and former slaves in the decades around the Civil War. The author begins his analysis with a document written by a person known to history only as "A Colored Man," a slave who in 1863 New Orleans, copied and commented on the U.S. Constitution. This text allows Hager the opportunity to outline his case, to speculate about the relationship between freedom and literacy, and to note how many slaves saw literacy as a way to enter a society that had systematically excluded them for centuries. The author focuses on texts that, in most cases, were not published--or written for publication. Although he supplies some history when needed (e.g., Nat Turner and the Emancipation Proclamation), his interest is not so much in external events as in the internal activities that were producing words and texts. He discusses an 1852 letter from Maria Perkins, for example, and notices how some sought to emulate the conventions they had learned from the writing of whites. Hager suggests we need a term for a genre he calls "the enslaved narrative," personal stories written by people still enslaved, not by the liberated or the escaped. An interesting section involves the writing of William Gould and the gradual emergence of the word we in his diary as he began to feel more a part of the literate world. Another category of documents are the letters of protest written during and after the war by African Americans complaining about their treatment, in some cases their maltreatment by Union soldiers. Hager also examines the emerging publications for black writers and readers. Sometimes dense but always engaging account of how the path to freedom was paved, in part, with written words.
