Kristopher A. Teters. Practical Liberators

Kristopher A. Teters positions the Union army at the center of the complex process of emancipation during the Civil War. Practical Liberators uses the sundry armies that operated in the vast western theater to test common white northerners’ commitment to emancipation in a war for union. Arguing “that pragmatism, far more than morality, motivated western officers to support emancipation” (2), Teters joins a growing list of scholars, including this reviewer, who view American emancipation as a moment contingent on military events and institutions. While enslaved peoples displayed bold and brave initiative in using the war to throw off the shackles of bondage, their self-generated liberation depended on Union troops to recognize and enforce the promise of freedom. Teters challenges prevailing scholarly conventions that imagine the Republican Party and United States soldiers as moral agents who crusaded against slavery from the war’s outset. Assessing how we judge history, he encourages readers to approach the American Civil War within the limited context of its time and to guard against anticipating emancipation’s inevitable triumph—a scholarly temptation sometimes sparked by the progressive teleology of modern sensibilities.

Context (archaeology) · Emancipation · Morality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies