ABSTRACT
There is a central paradox that articulates the experience of very many African-Americans during the era of the Civil War. Without the transforming upheavals of war they would not have been able to gain their freedom as rapidly as they did, but often they pursued that freedom and began to give it content by means they had adopted within the constraints of slavery before the war. As the dynamic transition from slavery to freedom developed, African-Americans also sometimes expressed hope through fresh aspirations. Customary patterns of behavior, however, even when combined with new hopes prompted by the course of events, failed fully to define the wartime experiences of slaves and ex-slaves. Much recent scholarship on the Civil War era has attributed a more active role than previous writing to AfricanAmericans, but recognition of black initiative is not the same as being able to assert black autonomy. Showing that African-Americans did much to make their own history must also entail recognizing (to paraphrase Marx) that they did not make it under conditions of their own choosing.
