Freedom's Delay: America's Struggle for Emancipation, 1776-1865

by Allen Carden

Overview

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed freedom for Americans from the domination of Great Britain, yet for millions of African Americas caught up in a brutal system of racially based slavery, freedom would be denied for ninety additional years until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776–1865 probes the slow, painful, yet ultimately successful crusade to end slavery throughout the nation, North and South.

This work fills an important gap in the literature of slavery’s demise. Unlike other authors who focus largely on specific time periods or regional areas, Allen Carden presents a thematically structured national synthesis of emancipation. Freedom’s Delay offers a comprehensive and unique overview of the process of manumission commencing in 1776 when slavery was a national institution, not just the southern experience known historically by most Americans. In this volume, the entire country is examined, and major emancipatory efforts—political, literary, legal, moral, and social—made by black and white, free and enslaved individuals are documented over the years from independence through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Freedom’s Delay dispels many of the myths about slavery and abolition, including that racial servitude was of little consequence in the North, and, where it did exist, it ended quickly and easily; that abolition was a white man’s cause and blacks were passive recipients of liberty; that the South seceded primarily to protect states’ rights, not slavery; and that the North fought the Civil War primarily to end the subjugation of African Americans. By putting these misunderstandings aside, this book reveals what actually transpired in the fight for human rights during this critical era. Carden’s inclusion of a cogent preface and epilogue assures that Freedom’s Delay will find a significant place in the literature of American slavery and freedom.

With a compelling preface and epilogue, notes, illustrations and tables, and a detailed bibliography, this volume will be of great value not only in courses on American history and African American history but also to the general reading public.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798895272626
Publisher:	University of Tennessee Press
Publication date:	02/03/2026
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376

About the Author

Allen Carden is professor of history at Fresno Pacific University in Fresno, California. He is the author of Puritan Christianity in America: Religion and Life in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

EPILOGUE
On March 16, 1995, the Mississippi legislature finally got around to ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.1 The amendment, banning slavery in the United States, had actually gone into effect in December of 1865 after three-fourths of the states approved it. As for implementing the amendment, Mississippi’s ratification was meaningless. But in terms of providing insight into the history of emancipation and race relations in America, Mississippi’s delayed action speaks loudly. Freedom’s delay may have officially ended in December of 1865, but it was a contested freedom that would continue to strain at the very fabric of American society for generations to come. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. began one of America’s greatest speeches with the words Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.2 Resistance to freedom for all Americans before 1865 involved much more than the economic importance of the institution of slavery. Race was at the very heart of that institution, and racial considerations have continued to be at the center of American society into our own day. There was never any legal question that the Thirteenth Amendment gave all Americans freedom from slavery, but the extent of that guaranteed freedom, the extent to which government should be proactive to ensure that freedom, and how responsibility should be divided between state and federal governments on this issue have been open to interpretation over the decades since the amendment went into effect. It became clear after the Civil War that no legislation could instantly change long-held attitudes about race and racial prejudice. As a conflict between preservation of the Union and Southern independence, the Civil War had clear-cut objectives. But when the war, from a Northern perspective, also evolved into a social revolution to end slavery, it became far more complicated to predict or to establish a consensus on what the outcome would, or should, look like.
The years following the Civil War saw an America both radically transformed in many ways and at the same time amazingly impervious to change when it came to freedom and equality for America’s former slave population. The turbulent and violent years of Reconstruction, which began with a roar of freedom and ended with a whimper of accommodation to the Old South, resulted in scant permanent improvement in the lives of many of the nation’s black population, despite the great price that had been paid for their freedom. In the struggle for true freedom and equality in America, emancipation proved to be, in words used by Winston Churchill pertaining to the Second World War, “not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning.”3 It is perhaps as true today as in the post–Civil War era that the nation needs to be reminded of Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” While so much has been achieved, the struggle to complete the unfinished work of realizing liberty and justice for all continues in our own day.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Slavery and Revolution: Truths Not So Self-Evident
2. Slavery and the Constitution: Freedom Compromised
3. Stumbling Forward: Emancipation Proceeds in New England and Pennsylvania
4. Forward to the Past: The South’s “Cavalier Kingdom”
5. The Arithmetic of Emancipation: From the Purchase of Louisiana to the Compromise over Missouri
6. The Sunset of Northern Slavery: Freedom without Equality
7. The Wolf by the Ear: Slave Resistance, White Reaction, and the Growing Abolitionist Movement
8. Freedom’s Faith: Slavery Sectionalizes the Sacred
9. Slavery and Manifest Division: The Mexican Cession, Free Soilers, and the Compromise of 1850
10. Rushing toward Disunion: Slavery and the Factious 1850s
11. Presidential Politics and the War for Slavery: The Southern Decision to Secede
12. Thenceforward, and Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey. to Emancipation
13. Slavery’s Death Throes: Emancipation during the Civil War
14. Union Victory and the Thirteenth Amendment: Free at Last?

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Freedom’s Delay is really the first effort to bring together in one volume the entire history of the formal struggle to end slavery in the United States. This book will be very useful in undergraduate American history surveys and in undergraduate and even graduate courses focusing on the early national/antebellum period.” —Joanne Melish, author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1789–1860

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