The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War

National Book Critics Circle Award winner Zoellner (Island on Fire) offers a ruminative history of emancipation. He argues that both slavery’s arrival and its eradication were processes, not single moments, and that the Emancipation Proclamation itself was an overdue response to on-the-ground realities, as opposed to the heroic act of an idealistic Abraham Lincoln. Zoellner frames his case around “contraband camps,” homes to Black refugees who fled enslavement during the Civil War. The camps formed in the wake of a legal loophole first exploited by Union general Benjamin Butler, who declared that if people were property, then they could be expropriated as contraband—an argument that essentially encouraged enslaved people to self-emancipate by the thousands. In early chapters, Zoellner shows how the camps functioned as crucibles for interracial mingling that would propel popular opinion toward abolition, and provides scintillating profiles of refugee residents—like the wartime spy Abraham Galloway—that emphasize how enslaved people claimed agency in their own liberation. Zoellner then provides an overview of contemporaneous political machinations, as well as several—at times overly digressive—chapters on slavery’s history that show how, in similar fashion, the official policies of enslavement arrived “only after praxis had set in.” With its ambling structure, Zoellner’s account thoroughly debunks the Great Man narrative around Lincoln and persuasively paints emancipation as a grassroots event. It’s a capacious reimagining of the spirit that animated the Civil War. (Sept.)