Freedom’s Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley by John C. Rodrigue (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom's Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley by John C. Rodrigue David T. Ballantyne Freedom's Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley. By John C. Rodrigue. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. xxii, 510. Paper, 34. 00, ISBN 978-1-108-43934-3; cloth, 120. 00, ISBN 978-1-108-42409-7. ) In Freedom's Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, John C. Rodrigue tracks the destruction of slavery through a focus on the lower Mississippi River Valley, a region that he End Page 440 presents as a microcosm of the South's experience of abolition and where "the exigencies of war, emancipation, and wartime Reconstruction. . . proved integral to this abolitionary process" (p. 2). He tells the parallel stories of Abraham Lincoln's evolving views on slavery and Reconstruction; disputes over slavery and readmission to the Union in Congress; state reorganization efforts in the lower Mississippi Valley; and the evolution of labor conditions in the region during and after the war. Rodrigue stresses "the difficulties. . . in translating military emancipation—or the freeing of slaves as a consequence of suppressing the rebellion—into the political objective of abolishing slavery as an institution" (pp. 3–4). In telling this story, he notes his debts to scholars of emancipation, abolition, and Reconstruction. Once state restoration efforts began, conservative Unionists mounted lengthy rearguard actions to secure readmission to the Union with slavery intact. Their resilience—especially in Louisiana and Tennessee—helped push congressional Republicans to link abolition to state restoration. Even after military defeat, many former slaveholders remained unconvinced that the institution of slavery was doomed. Throughout the war, slavery's opponents struggled with "the inherent difficulty—even impossibility—of ending slavery under the nation's antebellum constitutional system" (p. 465). For most of the war, they viewed the proper approach to be state-level abolition through the reorganization of loyal state governments rather than a federal constitutional amendment. It was not until Lincoln's reelection in 1864 that Congress considered a federal constitutional amendment as a measure to be enacted separately from having seceded states pass new constitutions abolishing slavery. Drawing heavily on sources from the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, Rodrigue's discussion of the trajectories of wartime labor arrangements on cotton and sugar plantations is particularly assured. Even as their conditions resembled "a truncated freedom, " and a provisional one at that, former slaves forced concessions from former slaveholders against a backdrop of improvised federal labor regulations (p. 173). Labor relations changed in Confederate-held areas as well. For their part, former slaveholders remained tenaciously opposed to emancipation and, later on, to the significant reconfiguring of labor arrangements in a postslavery world. Rodrigue does not discount the importance of Black activism, but he emphasizes the many obstacles—on the ground and in legislative halls—to Black southerners' self-emancipation efforts. An irony of the passage of an abolition amendment without complementary Reconstruction legislation in early 1865 was that "the consequences of abolition remained entirely unresolved" (p. 466). This failure to legislate before Lincoln's assassination was "a tragic miscalculation, " as it allowed President Andrew Johnson to ignore Lincoln's endorsement of Black voting and embrace a policy of leniency toward elite white southerners (p. 376). Subsequent race massacres in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866 helped push congressional Republicans to break with Johnson and demand a more thoroughgoing reordering of southern society as a condition for readmission to the Union. Even relatively enlightened white southerners who took charge of postwar Reconstruction efforts had remarkably constrained views about what Black freedom should End Page 441 look like and had misgivings about the abolition of slavery itself. Rodrigue ably highlights these limitations through a close focus on debates over slavery at Mississippi's Reconstruction convention—where delegates eventually settled on "slavery having been destroyed in the State of Mississippi, " thereby "dodging the question of who, exactly, had destroyed slavery"—and over the passage of Black Codes in the state later in 1865 (p. 433). Rodrigue's account is peppered. . .