Ever since the publication of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America (1935), historians have tried to explain why, after the Civil War, white and black workers did not form any kind of interracial alliance, or, more precisely, why the white northern working class, having clearly supported the abolition of slavery, turned its back on emancipated blacks once the goal was achieved. Arguably, one of the most persistent answers to this question was given by David Montgomery, who claimed in Beyond Equality (1967) that after the war the white working class, in actual fact, continued its fight for interracial emancipation, putting forward a race-neutral agenda against the so-called “wage slavery.” Workers, in other words, thought that the next step toward equality was to abolish economic poverty by reforming the heavily inefficient and unjust capitalist system based on the exploitation of the workforce. This fight knew no race colour, therefore it involved both whites and blacks. Montgomery argued that the failure of this struggle was determined by the inability of Radical Republicans to translate the emancipatory afflatus of the working class into political reality. With the failure of Radical Republicanism, workers’ movements became peripheral and lost their chance to enforce a racial egalitarian agenda. In the past thirty years, David Roediger has been one of the most vocal critics of Montgomery's idea that the white working class was open to interracial solidarity. His Wages of Whiteness (1991) explained how the will to defend whiteness-derived privileges brought white workers to reject any sort of cooperation with their black colleagues.

After twenty-five years spent exploring the concept of “whiteness” across the entire arc of American history, with Seizing Freedom Roediger has gone back to where Wages of Whiteness stopped, the end of the Civil War, to continue his race-centric history of the American working class. One of the most striking evolutions of Roediger's research is his methodological approach. Whereas in Wages of Whiteness he deployed psychoanalysis, Marxism and the new labor-history theories, in Seizing Freedom Roediger extracts a new understanding of race and the American working class through the use of theology, disability studies and a rich collection of visual sources. Seizing Freedom presents a series of parallel arguments: first of all, it recasts the centrality of slaves’ rebellion (what Roediger calls, following Du Bois, the “general strike of slaves”) as a key element that caused the Civil War. Second, it rearticulates the situation of post-emancipation blacks as that of disable citizens, using Douglas Baynton's studies on disability. Finally, Roediger accurately reconstructs the interactions between different radical movements, explaining the historical circumstances that led the racially diverse male working class and women's rights activists to fight against each other instead of cooperating for common goals.

Roediger convincingly uses these apparently separate arguments to answer the main research question of the book, namely why, after the Civil War, white male workers, women's suffragists, immigrant communities – the radical forces that were active in fighting slavery before 1865 – were so reluctant to understand that, after the abolition of legal slavery, race discrimination was still a problem that required a special amount of attention during Reconstruction. Roediger contends that the explosive change brought by slaves’ “Jubilee” reshaped the meaning of freedom and created a situation in which everyone felt entitled to pursue and realize their own emancipatory agenda. He accurately details how the enthusiasm generated by emancipation turned into a paradoxical situation, where each group prioritized its own political goal without showing any solidarity with those of the other groups – for example, women's suffragists came to the fore to put forward a Sixteenth Amendment on women's voting rights, but used white supremacism to attack emancipated slaves; conversely, white workers pursued the abolition of “wage slavery,” but systematically excluded black workers from trade unions and rejected the fight for women's votes. Crucially, then, Roediger argues that post-Civil War progressive movements were undermined by the combined effect of two mistakes, namely setting the bar of their expectations too high and failing to consistently cooperate with each other. Roediger's work manages to provide a narrative ample enough to answer the ambitious research questions it tackles. Ultimately, Seizing Freedom builds on the argument presented in Wages of Whiteness, namely that white workers rejected interracialism in order to defend the privileges given by their whiteness; however, it offers a more problematized point of view, which gives a rationale to explain the behaviour not only of white workers but also of women's rights activists, black communities, and immigrants. Securing its analysis to the development of historical circumstances, Roediger's work sheds light on the complicated reasons that brought these social forces to abandon the cause of racial equality after 1865.

To mention some potential limits of Seizing Freedom, it is unfortunate that the book focusses almost exclusively on the period from 1865 to 1870, dedicating only a small packed section at the end of chapter 4 to discussing the second half of Reconstruction. A more extended treatment of this period might have helped to widen the scope of the book. Moreover, in the introduction Roediger denounces a systemic neglecting of Du Bois's argument on the “general strike of slaves” and the role of slaves in causing the Civil War; however, he only mentions in passing the work of John Ashworth, which (albeit without using Du Bois) is entirely based on the idea that slaves’ rebellions had a key role in provoking the conflict.Footnote ¹

Despite these minor limits, Seizing Freedom is a book that not only investigates the past of American labour but also speaks to modern problems. Roediger, indeed, clearly connects the analysis of the post-Civil War United States with the present, stating that this is a work “for students, dropouts, and occupiers, though its distinctive combination of concerns will interest historians” (15). He is looking for lessons that can benefit present political movements, and the main one he can take from Seizing Freedom is that “realism actually demands more commitment to maintaining alliances, even at the cost of forgoing immediate gains, or of preserving existing advantages for groups constituting the coalition” (23). In conclusion, Roediger's attempt to systematize the efforts of progressive movements after 1865 into a single coherent narrative is a titanic, yet long overdue, operation, and his intertwined analysis of social forces pushes our understanding of the post-Civil War radical scenario forward. It does it by rearticulating the centrality of slaves’ self-emancipation and by using it to explain the development of progressive movements after 1865.