Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays By Eric Foner published by Norton, 466 pp. (2025)
Generally I don’t like to review “essays” by noted scholars. I enjoy reading them, but I am not so sure that the average reader will even know what the author is talking about. Last week, I read the new book Our Fragile Freedoms by the leading scholar of the Reconstruction Era, Eric Foner, and I can happily say that most of my readers will be able to understand his “essays” and many will learn from them.
Foner is an academic historian at Columbia University. He is the successor to Allan Nevins as the DeWitt Clinton Professor in American History. Nevins wrote the eight volume Civil War history Ordeal of the Union. Like Nevins, Foner puts a lot of emphasis on public history. His writing is for the general reader. That is reflected in this new volume.
Over the years, Foner has won the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Pulitzer. His most famous book is Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 put out in 1988. It set the standard for modern histories of Reconstruction.
Foner grew up on Long Island in Long Beach, just a few miles from my home. His father was a labor organizer and his uncle, Philip Foner, was both a pioneering labor historian and a controversial Communist. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s he got to know the pioneering African American historian of Reconstruction W.E.B. DuBois, a frequent guest at his home. This relationship helped get him started in questioning the accepted wisdom that mischaracterized Reconstruction and that totally left out Black perspectives of American history.
The essays in this latest book from Foner were primarily published in non-academic sources, There are articles from the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and several other sources. The sixty essays in the 466 page book cover the lead up to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s views on slavery both before the war and his changing position during the conflict, and the effort of Black Abolitionists to transform a struggle over “states rights” to one in which human rights took precedence.
Most of these essays are book reviews, so the scope of what Foner is writing on is somewhat set by the authors of the works he is discussing. For instance, he reviewed Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship. Of course, he is going to discuss the virtues of the book, but this is not an 800 word review. The review is about 5,000 words. Foner looks at the British role in suppressing the slave trade, but he also says that just one hundred years before English merchants made fortunes bringing Africans to the New World against their wills.
Foner says that while modern Americans understand the horrors of the slave trade, very few realize that three million Africans died either being captured by slave traders or while on board the ship. Not all were on English ships, many were on Spanish or Portuguese vessels, but in the 17th and 18th Centuries a large number were lost while under English control.
In a brief five page essay, Foner traces the development of slavery in the United States. While historians have given a lot of effort towards uncovering the truth behind slavery, Foner says that the general public suffers from historical amnesia. For example, few people know that escaped slaves fled to Florida which was under Spanish control. They left a country dedicated to the protection of English freedom to a country ruled by a king because escaped Blacks, if they converted to Catholicism, would be free.
Americans, Foner says don’t understand the changes in slavery during its two century existence in our present United States. The slave system in place at the period right before the war was much more harsh that the early days of human bondage. In the 1600s, Black slaves and white indentured servants often lived in the same community, shared meals, and had sexual relationships. In some British colonies, slaves were able to challenge their treatment by those who owned them in the colonial courts. After the Revolution, a Black woman challenged her enslavement saying that the newly adopted Massachusetts Constitution did not recognize slavery. She won her case and the courts made sure that no other Blacks were held in slavery.
In the 19th Century, most states ended slavery. Enforced servitude did persist in the 15 Southern states however. In fact, as the U.S. had set a deadline for ending the slave trade in 1808, South Carolina imported a record number of slaves to market in human flesh before the legal opportunity to make money from the foreign trade ended.
The “ubiquity” of the buying and selling of Black people before the Civil War was not something that many modern Americans thought about just a few years ago, says Foner. As recently as 2016, people were “shocked” to learn that Georgetown University kept itself afloat by placing on sale three hundred slaves owned by the Jesuits. This exclusively internal “middle passage” was participated in by many of the most prominent white people in the South, with the financial backing of large banking firms many of which were located in the “Free” North. Slave trading was not an underground profession engaged in by those too low to do common crimes, it was done openly by budding entrepreneurs hoping to transform slave capital into cash. Slave dealers openly posted ads for the sales of Black people on tavern walls and most Southern newspapers published ads for slave auctions. Writes Foner, “Slave trading was essential to the survival and profitability of the system.”
Slavery was not at all in decline as the Civil War approached. Foner writes that the largest slave auction in United States history took place only a year before Abraham Lincoln was elected president. The Savannah slave auction of 1859 saw four hundred Black people sold on the block. The auction catalogue contains entries like “George Jr., age 4, boy child; Harry age 2, boy child.”
When I was growing up, I often wondered why there was no mention of Black history in my standard Northern textbooks. Of, of course there was discussion of slavery, slight mention of Abolitionists and Emancipation, and a passage on George Washington Carver, but the history of Black America was virtually unknown to a child growing up in the 1960s. Part of this was by design. African Americans were never considered worthy of having their history recorded in state-approved textbooks. The inclusion of African American history could lead to the textbook not being approved by the powerful body reviewing textbooks for the state of Texas and other states that would condemn the book to the academic remainder table. Even beyond this suppression of Black history at the official level, the fact that Black families were so broken coming out of slavery that community contact that led to many histories in other poor communities was suppressed. Even the countries from which Black people come from ancestrally is lost. Modern Black people have begun to find out about their ancestry through DNA tests which give them a good way to find out where in Africa their ancestors came from and to find long-lost unknown relatives. As they find these relations, they come to conclusions about when their families were affected by slave sales. So we may see more Black history being filled in by genetic testing in the future.
Foner also has an essay on the Free Black inhabitants of Israel Hill along the Appomattox River in Virginia. A wealthy slave owner named Richard Randolph freed many of his slaves when he died in the late 1700s. Randolph left a will he condemned slavery as an “infamous practice.” Ninety men, women, and children were given their freedom along with some land to farm. Over the years, the Free Negroes, as they were called, were able to carve out some rights in their locality. Typically Freedmen elsewhere “belong to a degraded caste of society” according to one South Carolina court, but along the Appomattox they were able to hold property, sue in court, and, in some cases, intermarry with white neighbors. Apparently, before the Civil War the Free Black population was not entirely segregated by race. Unfortunately, the community lay in Prince Edward County which in the 1950s closed all its schools rather than have to integrate.
Elsewhere in the book, Foner compares various anniversary commemorations of the Civil War. In 1961, Charleston was lined with Confederate flags for the anniversary of Fort Sumter. That period was the time of massive white resistance to desegregation. In 2011, there were discussions of the Confederate influence in the city, but also of the fact that most South Carolinians were enslaved.
This was a return to how Americans understood the Civil War at the time of its fighting. When Grant made his World Tour after leaving the presidency, he told German Chancellor Bismarck that the war was “Not only to save the Union, but destroy slavery . . . a stain to the Union.” Foner says that for nearly a century, many Americans forgot about the dual war aims of the Union, reunion and emancipation. In fact in polls conducted during the Sesquicentennial, only a minority said the war was caused by slavery.
One does not need to be a specialist to read this book. All of the articles were written for the educated mass public. You may agree with some of the essays or you may not like others, however, this is an engaging book that readers in the Third Decade of the 20th Century will engage with.
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