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This concluding chapter summarizes the evidence gathered for the postbellum South and compares it with other postemancipation projects in the Americas. The common pattern of gradual emancipation seen in former colonial possessions in the Caribbean and South America has considerable similarity with early efforts to manage uncertainty in the era of Radical Reconstruction. As in the case of the American South, those postemancipation projects soon fell victim to competing claims and mobilization among landowners, workers, and other parties, leading to profound and durable uncertainty in the economies of former slave societies. Even in the twenty-first century, some of this durable uncertainty remains as the United States struggle with the legacies of slavery and emancipation.

Chapter 3 explores Susan Nye's encounters with slavery in antebellum Raleigh and the inherent difficulty of reconciling Christian moral philosophy with the practice of continued slaveholding. This chapter draws from several sources to understand early national perspectives on slavery and emancipation. These include Susan Nye's journals, the narrative of former slave Lunsford Lane, who lived in Raleigh when Susan taught there, the moral philosophy textbooks students used in her classes, selected newspaper accounts, and the Presbyterian Church's "Expression of Views" on slavery. Most historians have focused on the writings of prominent politicians, ministers, and social reformers to understand antebellum attitudes toward slavery, an approach that has overlooked teachers and schools. This chapter argues that educators played an important role in promoting an ideology of Southern benevolence that deferred the problem of emancipation to the far future.

Chapter 7 investigates Hutchison's published essays on slavery and the division of the Presbyterian Church. Her essays and journal entries provide glimpses of her thoughts about the abolition movement, southern benevolence, the division of her church, and the moral dilemmas of slavery. The tension between her long-held beliefs about gradual emancipation and the actual practice of slaveholding created a moral quandary during her later years. Eventually, she risked everything and began secretly to teach slaves to read, which was in violation of North Carolina's slave codes. By 1845, all of her sons had joined her in the South, but after 30 years in the region, she ultimately returned to the North. This chapter explores the influences that led to that decision.

The end of slavery reverberated through the North no less than the South. From the start of the war, black leaders in the free states had hoped to complete the uneven process of gradual emancipation that had been unfolding there since the Revolutionary War. They foresaw an end to the discriminatory laws and practices that compromised their citizenship and denied the elective franchise to most Northern black men. When the War Department began enlisting black soldiers, recruits soon encountered discrimination in the army and began to protest. Meanwhile, their families and other supporters at home leveraged the men's service to challenge all distinctions based on color, notably the practice of segregated streetcars in the cities. Several months before the war ended, black leaders resuscitated the antebellum national convention movement, and black communities across the North and in Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy selected delegates to participate in setting a national agenda for completing the abolition of slavery and extending all the rights of citizenship to black persons, North and South.

The introduction sketches the history of the case of Force v. Haines. It also challenges the conventional neo-abolitionism that has shaped much of the historiography of gradual emancipation. Finally, it situates the case as a problem in contract doctrine, as exemplifying issues in the law of consideration

This chapter explores the shock waves caused by the Haitian Revolution and the massive slave insurrection that took both the Americas and Europe by surprise. Despite the rarity of large-scale revolts after 1794, the Saint Domingue insurrection did have a lasting impact on the slaves. The greatest lesson they retained from Haiti was that the institution of slavery was neither unchangeable nor invincible. Amid the troubled backdrop of the age of revolutions, many attentively followed the legal changes upsetting their owners, like the Spanish Códigno Negro, the French abolition of slavery, gradual emancipation laws in the northern United States, and the ban of the slave trade by Great Britain and the United States. Furthermore, after 1794, protests during which slaves claimed freedom they believed to have been decreed by the king or the government, but hidden by their masters, multiplied.