Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest / Edition 1

by Leslie A. Schwalm

Overview

Most studies of emancipation's consequences have focused on the South. Moving the discussion to the North, Leslie Schwalm enriches our understanding of the national impact of the transition from slavery to freedom. Emancipation's Diaspora follows the lives and experiences of thousands of men and women who liberated themselves from slavery, made their way to overwhelmingly white communities in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and worked to live in dignity as free women and men and as citizens.

Schwalm explores the hotly contested politics of black enfranchisement as well as collisions over segregation, civil rights, and the more informal politics of race—including how slavery and emancipation would be remembered and commemorated. She examines how gender shaped the politics of race, and how gender relations were contested and negotiated within the black community. Based on extensive archival research, Emancipation's Diaspora shows how in churches and schools, in voting booths and Masonic temples, in bustling cities and rural crossroads, black and white Midwesterners—women and men—shaped the local and national consequences of emancipation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807859506
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	07/15/2009
Series:	The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
Edition description:	1
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Leslie A. Schwalm is associate professor of history, women's studies, and African American studies at the University of Iowa. She is author of A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 "A Full Realization of the Barbarities of Slavery" 9

Chapter 2 "A Time of Scattering" 43

Chapter 3 "Overrun with Free Negroes": The Politics of Wartime Emancipation and Migration in the Upper Midwest 81

Chapter 4 "To Go and Help Be Free": Migration and the Black Military Experience 107

Chapter 5 "The Building Up of Our Race": Creating a Life in Freedom 135

Chapter 6 "Freedom Was All They Had": Civil Rights and Northern Reconstruction 175

Chapter 7 "Agonizing Groans of Mothers" and "Slave-Scarred Veterans": History, Commemoration, and Memoir in the Aftermath of Slavery 219

Epilogue 265

Notes 267

Bibliography 339

Index 375

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Emancipation's Diaspora explores blacks' experiences of Civil War and Reconstruction in the upper Midwest, a history that has received too little scholarly attention. Schwalm's story emerges in the voices of African Americans themselves, drawing on a broad range of archival sources, from memoirs to black newspapers. This is a terrific book that makes an important contribution to the historiographies of black Reconstruction and Midwestern slavery and emancipation.—Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky

Editorial Reviews

Emancipation's Diaspora successfully demolishes the insistence of some authors that emancipation really did not change anything, but it is also exquisitely sensitive to the very complicated nature of emancipation's impact on ideas about race in the United States. . . . It is impossible to finish this book and not see slavery, race, and emancipation as truly national questions whose repercussions continued to reverberate throughout the entire nineteenth century and beyond.—Journal of Illinois History



Expand[s] our historical understanding of black migration and presence in the Midwest after the Civil War. . . . [The] diversity of sources . . . creates an especially rich base of evidence that tells the story of Iowa, but also of the region and the country as a whole. . . . An important book for all scholars of midwestern history.—Annals of Iowa



[A] remarkable book. . . . Relying on an impressive array of manuscript collections, newspapers, census data, diaries, letters, army records, and memoirs, Schwalm makes a case that is undeniable. . . . The book is especially strong in bringing into focus the lives of black women.—Minnesota History



Confirms US Reconstruction's national dimensions. . . . Recommended.—Choice



An engaging analysis of a region that historians of race have neglected. . . . [An] important book.—Journal of Southern History



[Schwalm] has done historians of race, slavery, and Reconstruction a great service by locating her study in a veritable no-man's land [the Midwest]. . . . Impressive.—H-Net Reviews



Breadth and ingenuity in research, historiographical sophistication, and a lucid prose style make this study a major contribution.—American Historical Review



Emancipation's Diaspora is ambitious and rewarding, making tangible the personal and political impact of slavery beyond the South and beyond 1865. . . . Although other historians have studied northern states during Reconstruction, none begins with the insight that they too faced emancipation. . . . Schwalm achieves a geographical and chronological reorientation through her remarkable rendering of the grief, joys, and longings of ordinary people.—Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era



A much needed addition to the growing historiography on emancipation and Reconstruction. . . . Innovative. . . . Persuasively demonstrates that historians would be remiss to ignore the consequences of emancipation and its subsequent diaspora in regions outside of the slave South—specifically, the Upper Midwest.—Indiana Magazine of History



This book's regional focus and its attention to gender and women's experiences make it a crucial contribution to an ongoing reevaluation of black history, racial politics, and sectional identity in the nineteenth-century North. . . . Schwalm deftly uses archival and published military records. . . . An invaluable entry in a growing body of scholarship on the impact of slavery and its legacies outside the South.—Civil War History

From the Publisher