The Long Emancipation is a reworking of a series of papers given by Professor Berlin at Harvard as part of the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures on African-American History. Although an elegant hardback, the book runs to only 175 pages (excluding notes) and can easily be devoured in a single sitting.

Berlin critiques a Whiggish approach that would see the process towards emancipation as one of gradual escalation culminating in the Civil War. Instead, though proceeding in a broadly chronological manner, he offers four thematic lenses through which to approach the topic: the necessity of African American agency, the uncertainty of post-emancipation black citizenship/status, the contradictory ideals of Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, and the inevitability of brutality needed to realize the goal. In chapter 1, Berlin fleshes out these ideas. He suggests that of these four elements, the role of African American men and women was the most essential, as they provided the “yeast in the ferment – the active element that was critical for the growth of abolition” (40). In so doing, Berlin successfully challenges the contention of João Pedro Marques (2010) that the quest for emancipation was not “the black man's business” (5).

The book finds its narrative pace in chapter 2, “Sounding the Egalitarian Clarion,” where Berlin explores the emancipationist movement in the early republic. The Revolutionary War offered some of the earliest routes to freedom, not only through military service, but also via the utilization of legal–judicial means during a time of great upheaval. However, just as quickly as African Americans seized these legal routes to freedom, slave-owners decried the infringement of their “property” rights – a critical move, as Berlin presents it, in turning the question of emancipation from being an issue for the present to an issue for the future. Berlin portrays the sluggish northern elimination of slavery as “the emancipation that freed no one,” and illustrates clearly the lack of ideological determination behind what was, in effect, a pragmatic move toward emancipation in the North. Nevertheless, Berlin does depict the North's actions – even if unheroic – as being a “signal moment” in US history, increasing the preexisting divisions between the North and the South (70–71). The chapter then moves on to explore the role of African Americans in putting pressure on the gradualist North and doing what could be done against the increasingly anti-emancipationist South. Berlin argues that as the South (and slavery) grew at the dawn of the nineteenth century, white emancipationists gradually gave up, and the movement to end slavery became the preserve of black Americans.

Chapter 3 highlights how black leadership of the emancipation movement led to a final break with gradualism. Berlin selects some key actors, particularly Denmark Vesey and David Walker, to illustrate this point, and sees these two as precursors to the later – and perhaps more canonical – Frederick Douglass, and the leading white advocate of immediate emancipation, William Lloyd Garrison. The chapter also emphasizes the southern reaction against these more radical emancipationists – with the complicity of many northerners – through a campaign of terror, kidnapping and slave catching. The conclusion of Berlin's book turns to the Civil War itself, the time that “changed nothing and everything” (158). Although Congressional action (such as the Confiscation Acts) is duly credited with moving things forward, the author once again highlights the role of black actors, willing to risk it all to cross over to Union lines and, in so doing, creating a marked shift in northern opinion in favour of emancipation (if not equality).

Berlin himself aptly describes his work as a “slim presentation of the structure of slavery's demise” (214). Consequently, scholars well read in the antebellum era will find little that is new here. Yet the volume's lively pace and clear argumentation – particularly for the ongoing role of African Americans in the century-long demise of slavery – provides an excellent starting point for any student of US history seeking to enter the debate on antebellum slavery and emancipation.