Through the dramatic and moving letters and testimony of freed slaves, Families and Freedom tells the story of the remaking of the black family during the tumultuous years of the Civil War era. Drawn from the work of the award-winning Freedmen and Southern Society project at the University of Maryland, the book is a sequel to the 1994 Lincoln Prize winner, Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War.

Former slaves, free blacks, and their contemporaries recount the elation accompanying the reunion of brothers and sisters separated for half a lifetime and the anguished realization that time lost could never be made up. We encounter the quiet satisfaction of legitimizing a marriage once denied by law and the unspeakable sadness of discovering that a long-lost spouse had remarried, the pride of establishing an independent household and the shame of not being able to protect it.

In their words, we share the hope that freedom would ensure the sanctity of family life and the fear that the new order would betray freedom's greatest promise.