Henry Page, a free Black Tennessean, wanted to liberate his family—even if it meant participating in a legal system upholding bondage. In 1857, he agreed to pay installments for the freedom of his wife, Dilly, and children, Britton and William. The outbreak of war in 1861 disrupted Henry’s progress. Like many Black southerners, the Pages might have been overjoyed by the secessionists’ gamble. They believed the Civil War would upend bondage. Ultimately, it did. Shortly after the fighting commenced, enslaved men, women, and children sprinted north to freedom. Then, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to turn the fortunes of war by making allies of enslaved southerners. Finally, in 1865, freedom was made final when Congress passed and the states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. But the Pages discovered that if slavery had died, its specter remained. The Pages’ enslaver sued Henry for payment and, after Henry’s accidental death, demanded Dilly pay the debt. When the Tennessee Supreme Court decided the case in 1871, they deemed the Thirteenth Amendment irrelevant and ordered her to hand over a portion of the balance. In the end, although slavery was abolished, the Pages paid for their freedom. Their family’s legal woes epitomize how slavery haunted freedpeople. This haunting is the subject of Giuliana Perrone’s Nothing More than Freedom.
In this book, Perrone assesses approximately 700 private law cases where some aspect of slavery (re)appeared after the Civil War. Perrone tells this story in eight chapters, addressing an array of issues judges faced after the tectonic shift in law caused by the Reconstruction Amendments. Throughout the book, Perrone shows that in the post-Civil War moment, judges remained divided on how to handle legal questions dealing with slavery. Eventually, the courts sided with settled legal principles, jettisoning the revolutionary possibilities of legal abolitionism. As a result, Perrone argues, judges robbed the Thirteenth Amendment of its radical potential. Perrone provides an analysis that clarifies aspects of Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow, showing that racism was a systemic problem harassing freedpeople long after slavery’s demise.
The first chapter covers early interpretations of the Thirteenth Amendment, which is fundamental to appreciating the distinct views of the amendment and the eventual decision to rely on antebellum precedent rather than embracing a radical approach. Perrone shows that judges favoring a comprehensive implementation of legal abolition reasoned that those aspects of the law where elements of slavery survived served to disadvantage the formerly enslaved. So long as such aspects of slavery persisted, Black men and women would remain handicapped. So, judges argued, the myriad legal components that established and maintained slavery needed to be cut out of the law entirely. They contended that since the amendment abolished slavery, it both ended an enslaved person’s chattelhood and rendered vestigial the legal tools that undergirded slavery as a legal institution. In Wainwright v. Bridges (1867), the judge provided a concise articulation of the idea grounding abolitionist jurisprudence, writing, “Emancipation, and the existence of laws upholding slavery, are incompatible. They cannot exist together” (32). Such judges thought that they must therefore not only ensure enslavers did not coerce men and women to labor without compensation; rather, they must also purge aspects of slavery hindering the full enjoyment of freedom in all corners of the law. Perrone details how such views played out in various aspects of the law and shaped postwar debates over abolition.
In detailing legal debates over the meaning of abolition, Perrone importantly contributes to an ongoing project by scholars of emancipation. Scholars such as Jim Downs, Chandra Manning, Amy Murrell Taylor, and Joseph Reidy have demonstrated that liberation did not come all at once, and the path to freedom was not linear. It was winding, halting, and for some, unending. Frequently, a formerly enslaved man, woman, or child experienced aspects of his or her prior servitude after having claimed freedom. These scholars have shown that illness and starvation accompanied wartime emancipation. Along the road to freedom, Black southerners also often faced reenslavement or subjugation. Perrone adds to this body of scholarship, “demonstrat[ing] in law … emancipation happened many times over (and sometimes more than once in the same jurisdiction),” and it did so after the ink on the Thirteenth Amendment had dried (77). Perrone’s investigation of slavery in private sectors of the law reveals yet again that the end of enslavement did not mean that slavery no longer harmed freed men, women, and children.
By shining a light on places where slavery survived following the Civil War, Perrone has made a valuable contribution useful to scholars wishing to better appreciate the trials freedpeople faced even after breaking their chains. This book is most handy for scholars of the law and emancipation. But a range of readers will find Nothing More than Freedom enriching. Those interested in African Americans’ unending fight for liberation, or how systematic racism undermined their progress in the last decades of the nineteenth century, will find Perrone’s discoveries fascinating. With Nothing More than Freedom, Perrone has provided further insight into the fraught struggle for freedom, a struggle that lasted long after slavery’s demise.
