For a century and a half, Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation has been the dominant narrative of African American freedom in the Civil War era. However, David Williams suggests that this portrayal marginalizes the role that African American slaves played in freeing themselves. At the Civil War's outset, Lincoln made clear his intent was to save the Union rather than free slaves - despite his personal distaste for slavery, he claimed no authority to interfere with the institution. By the second year of the war, though, when the Union army was in desperate need of black support, former slaves who escaped to Union lines struck a bargain: they would fight for the Union if it committed itself to freedom. Williams importantly demonstrates that freedom was not simply the absence of slavery but rather a dynamic process enacted by self-emancipated African American refugees, which compelled Lincoln to modify his war aims and place black freedom at the center of his wartime policies. "If asked 'who freed the slaves?' most Americans would probably still answer Abraham Lincoln. But that answer does not do justice to the far more complicated process by which freedom was achieved or give credit to the primary movers behind it. This book reclaims the term 'self-emancipation', which only fell out of favor after the Civil War, to show how slaves were central to initiating and sustaining their own freedom. It is an eminently readable and engaging testament of stories that emanate from below, which provide a fuller picture of how the nation survived one of its most searing crises." Tera Hunter, Princeton University "I Freed Myself challenges more than a century of accepted scholarship that has situated Lincoln at the center of the emancipation story. By making black voices loud and clear, David Williams tells a story that historians will no longer be able to dismiss: how African Americans, the most powerless people in American history, collectively forced emancipation to be the fulcrum of the American Civil War and won their own freedom." Scott Hancock, Gettysburg College "Mastering primary sources and a vast secondary literature, and writing with verve and clarity, David Williams has made an important, lasting contribution to studies of the Civil War era. His book proves beyond doubt that the actions of America's slaves repeatedly, and in many different ways, pushed emancipation onto the nation's agenda." Paul Escott, Wake Forest University "Timely and engaging, I Freed Myself offers a bold and unapologetic challenge to the conventional narrative of one of the most significant events in American history. Demonstrating that black freedom wasn't bequeathed in an eloquent proclamation or bestowed as an inadvertent by-product of the Civil War, Williams draws on recent scholarship and his own meticulous research to place African Americans at the center of a negotiated process through which they leveraged their freedom. This is a passionately argued, gracefully written, and genuinely provocative book, one that deserves a wide readership and a place in undergraduate classrooms." Mark Hersey, Mississippi State University This book examines the many ways in which African Americans made the Civil War about ending slavery. David Williams is Professor of History at Valdosta State University in Georgia, where he specializes in the Civil War era and the antebellum South. He is the author of ten books, including Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War and A People's History of the Civil War.