Although played out against the ever-changing circumstances of American life, these four omnipresent constituents of emancipation's long history provide the essentials for understanding the arrival of universal freedom." First and foremost was "the resolute commitment of a few men and women-most of them black slaves, along with former slaves and the descendants of slaves-to end slavery and create a slaveless world." Second was "the issue of black people in freedom, and therefore the question of citizenship and its attributes. In Berlin's calculus, "it can best be revealed by examining the elements-four in number-that shaped the long struggle for universal freedom. Some historians have interpreted emancipation as a continuous linear progression toward freedom, while others have presented slavery and anti-slavery as parallel trajectories in which "emancipation's road was long and bumpy," its outcome uncertain. Emancipation, in short, was a critical moment in the history of racialization-and it, too, was a long process." At every turn, the coincidence between blackness and slavery, was reconstituted in the creation of a new relationship. In 211 riveting pages, he "connects the arrival of freedom with the post-emancipation standing of former slaves, hence the debate over citizenship and its attributes, among them race, as well as with the confrontation over property-in-man that made some people rich.
Seldom has anyone captured the essence of so vital and complex a phenomenon in such a cohesive manner. "Freedom's arrival was not the work of a moment it was a process, rather than an occasion." That is the organizing thesis of The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States by Ira Berlin, the premier historian of American slavery world.
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