For those interested in reading further, here is a brief bibliography of a few of the key primary sources and scholarship most helpful to the research for Beyond Freedom’s Reach. For precise information on specific points in the book, please consult the endnotes in the Beyond Freedom’s Reach.
Primary sources (Click on the title for access to a digitized, online version.)
Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. An amazing, searchable database of Lincoln’s correspondence.
Butler, Benjamin F. Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. 5 vols. Norwood, MA.: The Plimpton Press, 1917. Butler’s correspondence is a rich source of information about Union government in New Orleans from April 1861 through December 1862. (For Vol. II, spanning June 1862-February 1863, click here.)
Gardner’s New Orleans Directory for 1861… New Orleans: Charles Gardner, 1861. The Directory contains an alphabetical listing of the names of thousands of New Orleanians in 1861, along with their addresses and occupations.
New Orleans Daily Picayune. A full run of this newspaper from 1845 to 1865 is available to subscribers of the Proquest Civil War Era database.
Norman’s chart of the lower Mississippi river. New Orleans: B. Norman, 1858. An extraordinary map of the plantations and property ownership along the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Natchez.
U.S. Senate, Message of the President of the United States, communicating, in compliance with a resolution of the Senate of the 5th instant; a report from the Secretary of State, upon the subject of the supposed kidnapping of colored persons in the southern states for the purpose of selling them as slaves in Cuba (S.exdoc.30; Serial Set 1238). This report introduced me to Rose Herera’s case – or as her name is spelled her, Rose Elyra.
The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901. The OR, as it is affectionately known by historians, is the starting point for all studies of the military operations of the Civil War.
Books by historians
Slavery
Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Graham, Sandra Lauderdale. House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Guterl, Matthew Pratt. American Mediterranean: American Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Johnson, Walter. Soul By Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Schwarz, Marie Jenkins. Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Emancipation
Berlin, Ira, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland. Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Berlin, Ira, Thavolia Glymph, Steven J. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie Rowland, and Julie Saville. The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South. Series I, Volume 3 of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861-1867. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Litwack, Leon. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Mitchell, Mary Niall. Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013.
Williams, Heather Andrea. Help Me To Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
New Orleans and Louisiana
Campanella, Richard. Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics before the Storm. Lafayette, La: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006.
Capers, Gerald. Occupied City; New Orleans under the Federals. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965.
Follett, Richard. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Ochs, Stephen J. A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
Pierson, Michael D. Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Scott, Rebecca, and Jean M. Hébrard. Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Schafer, Judith Kelleher. Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth. Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.