On The Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia

In this enlightening study, Clarence L. Mohr follows the demise of chattel slavery in one state of the Confederate South. Like the slavery regime itself, Mohr’s story is biracial in character, embracing the perspectives of both blacks and whites as they struggled to comprehend the approach of black freedom within a framework of attitudes and assumptions shaped by decades of mutual exposure to Georgia’s peculiar institution. By exploring in detail the changing patterns of black-white interaction that preceded legal emancipation in 1865, On the Threshold of Freedom defines central tendencies within Georgia slavery and suggests important links between antebellum life and the events of early Reconstruction.

Clarence L. Mohr, former chair of the department of history at the University of South Alabama, was the coauthor of Tulane: The Emergence of a Modern University, 1945–1980, and assistant editor of The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume I, 1841–1846.