Book Review: Landscapes of Freedom: Restoring the History of Emancipation and Citizenship in Yorktown, Virginia 1861-1940
Landscapes of Freedom: Restoring the History of Emancipation and Citizenship in Yorktown, Virginia 1861-1940. By Rebecca Capobianco Toy. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2025. Paperback, 264 pp. $29.99.
By Greg M. Romaneck
On October 19, 1781, British General Lord Cornwallis enacted the surrender of his roughly eight-thousand-man army besieged in Yorktown, to the colonial forces commanded by George Washington. Although it took two more years before a formal peace treaty was signed between the British and representatives of the newly minted United States, the siege at Yorktown was the engagement that broke the back of the British effort to subdue their rebellious North American colonies. From that point in American history, until the present day, Yorktown has been held as a critical landscape, essential to understanding the saga of the American people. While this commemoration of Yorktown as a significantly important historical landscape due to its Revolutionary War roots is understandable, what is generally forgotten is that the Civil War and all aspects of slavery touched the region as well.
In Landscapes of Freedom: Restoring the History of Emancipation and Citizenship in Yorktown, Virginia 1861-1940, Rebecca Capobianco Toy takes her readers back to the Civil War and Reconstruction era, with a focus on expanding our understanding of just how Yorktown, and its surrounding counties, played a meaningful role in that age. In telling this story, Toy pays particular attention to the processes whereby African Americans not only shed the chains of slavery but also strove to secure land and establish a meaningful future for themselves and generations yet to come. This is a story filled with resilience, determination, abuse, betrayal, and sadness. It is also a tale well told by a historian that helps her reading audience understand that the history we think we know may well only be a shadow of what actually happened.
In Toy’s book, a primary focus is on how formerly enslaved people used the coming of Union forces to begin the process of radically changing their lives. When Union troops entered Yorktown and its surrounding area, they set in motion a sequence of events that led to African American people migrating to land abandoned by Confederate sympathizers. Whether it was through direct seizure or the parceling out of land by Union forces or Federal agencies, many African American families staked a claim to properties upon which they once served as slave laborers. As months and years passed, an expectation was generated within the hearts and minds of formerly enslaved people that encompassed having land to live an independent life of freedom. From the perspective of once enslaved Black people, it was their labor that had generated the wealth that southern landowners amassed. In the words of one African American farmer, “Didn’t we clear the land…and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, and tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything? And didn’t them large cities of the north grow up on the cotton and the sugar and the rice that we made?” (130)
Time after time, not only in the Yorktown region but also in many locales across the former Confederate states, the hopes of all too many formerly enslaved men, women, and children were dashed by shifting policies enacted by leaders in Washington who had little concern for the fate of newly freed people. As Toy shows in her detailed review of land holding in the Yorktown area, Black people did manage to hold onto property across generations. However, most of those farmers who were gifted land eventually had the rug pulled out from under them by Andrew Johnson and American apathy. From Toy’s perspective, and those of contemporary abolitionists, a great opportunity was lost when several million people were emancipated, granted citizenship, and then had no provision made for their long-term financial wellbeing.
Another central pillar in Rebecca Toy’s book is that of historical memory. Through concerted efforts over time, Yorktown was transformed into a colonial national park with little, to no notation of the Civil War and Reconstruction aspects of its history. This abrogation of Yorktown’s fuller history lessens its impact and opens questions of institutional tunnel vision at the expense of truth. As Toy notes, “If national parks are places where we go to learn about the nature of the American nation and consider what the past can contribute to our collective future, then they need to better represent the lived experience of all Americans.” (13) By delimiting, or even erasing, the lot of African Americans at Yorktown our park services and historians serve to lessen the bravehearted efforts of newly freed people who wanted their place in the sun. As the author notes, “Excluding voices from the past does more than skew the historical record, it continues to cause harm in the present.” (15) In Toy’s work, the story of these ignored Americans is well told in a book grounded on painstaking research and a dedication to an almost forgotten people whose story should be known.
Greg M. Romaneck is retired after working for 34 years as a professional educator and consultant. During those years he held positions such as special education teacher, assistant principal, elementary principal, adjunct professor, director of special education, student teaching supervisor, and associate superintendent. Mr. Romaneck has also trained as a counselor and worked in areas such as crisis intervention, mediation, problem solving, and conflict resolution. Greg has had several books and numerous articles published on a variety of subjects such as Education, Psychology, Self-Improvement, Backpacking, Eastern Philosophy, Civil War history, Poetry, and Bible studies. Greg has also had nearly 3,500 book reviews published by Childrenslit.com, a popular source of information for educators, librarians, and parents regarding books for younger readers and has reviewed Civil War books for four decades for a variety of publications and magazines. Most recently Greg was the featured book reviewer for more than a decade with the Civil War Courier. Greg resides in DeKalb, Illinois and enjoys spending time with his family & friends, hiking, kayaking, backpacking, reading, and writing.
