I was actually waiting for this response, which comes from people so addicted to grievence that they are unable to engage with the scholarship as it exists.
Read McPherson, read Foner, read Berlin, read Hahn, read Fields, read Sinha, etc. Simply glance through the scholarship and you’ll quickly see that answer to “who freed the slaves” is “the slaves did.”
It was enslaved Africans who forced the question of emancipation in the revolutionary period, pushing New England legislatures toward gradual emancipation laws with freedom suits and public advocacy.
It was enslaved Africans who, through escape and rebellion, drove the recurring political confrontations over slavery in the early 19th century.
It was enslaved Africans and their free black allies who pushed the white anti-slavery movement away from colonization and toward abolitionism.
You can keep going down the list here, all the way to the Civil War, which becomes a war of liberation because enslaved Africans and free blacks *made it* a war of liberation.
There is no question that Lincoln — with his political shrewdness, intellectual flexibility, resolve, and sincere anti-slavery beliefs — is an important part of the story.
But like any skilled politician, Lincoln capitalized on events, he did not drive them. As soon as shooting started, the enslaved forced the issue by fleeing to Union lines & abandoning plantations. They were the irrepressible actor, who made a war of abolition a live possibility.
And when *that* war came, they took up arms to fight it.
The slaves freed the slaves.
