Family & Freedom: Black Families in the American Civil War

By Ira Berlin | Published in History Today Volume: 37 Issue: 1 1987

The newly-found voices of the slaves caught up in the American Civil War, and heard through letters to their families, are a testimony to their tenacity and unity in the struggle for emancipation.

A photograph of Hubbard Pryor during the Civil War No event in, American history matches the drama of emancipation. More than a century later, it continues to stir the deepest emotions, and properly so. Emancipation accompanied the military defeat of the world's most powerful slaveholding class. It freed some four million slaves, a larger number than were emancipated in all other New World slave societies combined.