ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the lead of the FSSP and Civil War scholars by concentrating largely on the wartime processes that led to the final end of slavery in the US, although historians of the Abolitionist Movement and scholars of comparative emancipation tend to frame the story over decades. With few African Americans in their communities and often with deep economic reliance on slave-labor-produced goods, most white northerners entered the Civil War with no intention of disrupting slavery. The effects of emancipation on black communities and people across the South varied enormously, particularly because of the complicating effects of gender. While African American women and children filled the contraband camps, African American men increasingly joined the military. Nearly all of the many excellent histories of black life in the postwar era ground their analysis in the forces unleashed by emancipation.
