Architects of Managed Emancipation: The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission and the Multiple Visions of the Post-Emancipation American State

Abstract W.E.B. Du Bois described the emancipation of four million enslaved people during the Civil War as the “most dramatic episode in American history.” Of course, as Du Bois himself understood, Emancipation was anything but episodic. It was a long, contested process that transformed the national economy and the American state. This article examines the federal commission charged with managing the process of emancipation—the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC). Drawing on extensive archival research, this article advances an analysis of the AFIC’s activities with a focus on the Commissioners’ racial ideology, economic policy, and observations on wartime emancipation. This article shows how the AFIC advanced a vision of a post-Emancipation federal state which used labor and land regulation to reshape the political economy of the South. At the same time, the AFIC rejected or otherwise marginalized alternative visions of emancipation—from the racial domination of white planters to the liberatory hopes of freedpeople.