In this episode of Think Back, I talk with historian Tom Zoellner about his new book The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War. We dig into a dimension of emancipation that often gets overshadowed by presidential proclamations and congressional acts: the ground-level pressure created by enslaved people themselves. Zoellner traces how thousands of self-emancipated men and women forced the Union to confront slavery not as an abstraction, but as an urgent reality. The Underground Railroad, in effect, became “above ground,” and the war’s meaning began to shift.

Our conversation explores how slavery both rose and fell through a series of piecemeal, improvised decisions—legal maneuvers, military necessities, human acts of courage that accumulated into an unstoppable revolution. We discuss Lincoln’s leadership, the messy realities of the contraband camps, the present-day politics of how this history is told, and why the struggle over emancipation’s meaning is far from over.

Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon

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