The last time I was embarrassed, events unfolded in a familiar pattern. I was in the presence of others when I discovered that I had committed a small gaffe of which they were aware; coincident with my realization of my mistake came aversive arousal and a warm face, a sheepish grin, and an averted gaze. I was mildly mortified and, genuinely regretful, I apologized. In response, my audience offered some mild teasing that seemed playful instead of malicious, and I was evidently forgiven: Our interaction then continued as if my blunder had not occurred, and my miscue was not mentioned again.

This was just a single, potentially idiosyncratic episode of embarrassment, but my guess is that you recognize that pattern of events. It's prototypical. All of its elements - the public misbehavior; the unbidden, involuntary wash of chagrin and abashment; the particular sequence of nonverbal behavior; the resulting helpful, conciliatory actions; and the tolerant, lenient responses from others - characterize embarrassment among adults all over the world (Miller, 1996).

Further, just as in my example - and given that one has transgressed in some manner - most embarrassments have a happy ending. Embarrassed emotion is certainly unpleasant; it is a blend of fretful mortification and chagrin that is discomforting and sometimes humiliating. Nevertheless, among adults, embarrassment usually elicits kinder reactions from others than those that would have been forthcoming had one's embarrassment not occurred (Miller, 1996).

The beginning of the Civil War marked the beginning of the end of slavery in the American South. At first, most white Americans denied what would eventually seem self-evident. With President Abraham Lincoln in the fore, federal authorities insisted that the nascent conflict must be a war to restore the national union, and nothing more. Confederate leaders displayed a fuller comprehension of the importance of slavery, which Vice-President Alexander Stephens called the cornerstone of the Southern nation. But if Stephens and others grasped slavery's significance, they assumed that the Confederate struggle for independence would require no change in the nature of the institution. A Southern victory would transform the political status, not the social life, of the slave states; black people would remain in their familiar place. Despite a vigorous dissent from Northern abolitionists, most white people – North and South – saw no reason to involve slaves in their civil war.

Slaves had a different understanding of the sectional struggle. Unmoved by the public pronouncements and official policies of the federal government, they recognized their centrality to the dispute and knew that their future depended upon its outcome. With divisions among white Americans erupting into open warfare, slaves watched and waited, alert for ways to turn the military conflict to their own advantage, stubbornly refusing to leave its outcome to the two belligerents.

Freedom came to most American slaves only through force of arms. The growing Northern commitment to emancipation availed nothing without victory on the battlefield. But once federal policy makers had committed the Union to abolishing slavery, the Northern armies that eroded Confederate territory simultaneously expanded the domain of freedom. The Union army perforce became an army of liberation, and as it did, both the Northern public and the freed slaves themselves demanded that the direct beneficiaries of freedom join the battle against the slaveholders' rebellion. The incorporation of black soldiers into Union ranks at once turned to Northern advantage a vast source of manpower that the Confederacy proved incapable of tapping and enhanced the antislavery character of the war. The liberating force of black enlistments weakened slavery in the loyal border states and the Union-occupied South no less than in the Confederacy, thereby extending the nation's commitment to freedom beyond the limits of the Emancipation Proclamation. Black enlistees in the border states received their freedom, and, eventually, their enlistment also guaranteed the liberty of their immediate families. Throughout the slave states, black enlistment and slave emancipation advanced together and, indeed, became inseparable.

Black men coveted the liberator's role, but soldiering remained a complex, ambiguous experience. If most free blacks and slaves rushed to join the Union army, others entered federal service only at the point of a bayonet.

As slavery deteriorated during the American Civil War, fundamental questions arose about the social order that would take its place. Amid the tumult and danger of war, former slaves – usually designated “contrabands” or “freedmen” – struggled to secure their liberty, reconstitute their families, and create institutions befitting a free people. But no problem loomed larger than finding a means of support. Having relinquished the guarantee of subsistence that accompanied slavery, freedpeople faced numerous obstacles to gaining a livelihood. Many had fled their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs. Others had been abandoned by their owners. Nearly all began life in freedom without tools or land, with no certain source of food, clothing, or shelter, and with no means to provide for the old, the young, the sick, or the disabled. For generations the slaves' labor had enriched their owners. Now, in freedom, would they or others benefit from their toil?

Military operations in the slave states compelled Northern officials to confront the same questions. Fugitive slaves poured into federal lines, searching for protection and freedom. Other slaves came under Union control as Northern forces occupied parts of the Confederacy. From the first, military considerations encouraged officers in the field and officials in Washington to mobilize former slaves on behalf of the Union war effort. Provision also had to be made for those who could not be usefully employed by the army or navy.

No event in American history matches the drama of emancipation. More than a century later, it continues to stir the deepest emotions. And properly so. Emancipation in the American South accompanied the military defeat of the world's most powerful slaveholding class. It freed a larger number of slaves than did the end of slavery in all other New World societies combined. Clothed in the rhetoric of biblical prophecy and national destiny and born of a bloody civil war, it accomplished a profound social revolution. That revolution destroyed forever a way of life based upon the ownership of human beings, restoring to the former slaves proprietorship of their own persons, liquidating without compensation private property valued at billions of dollars, and forcibly substituting the relations of free labor for those of slavery. In designating the former slaves as citizens, emancipation placed citizenship upon new ground, defined in the federal Constitution and removed beyond the jurisdiction of the states. By obliterating the sovereignty of master over slave, it handed a monopoly of sovereignty to the newly consolidated nation-state. The freeing of the slaves simultaneously overturned the old regime of the South and set the entire nation upon a new course.

With emancipation in the South, the United States enacted its part in a world-wide drama. Throughout the western world and beyond, the forces unleashed by the American and French revolutions and by the industrial revolution worked to undermine political regimes based upon hereditary privilege and economic systems based upon bound labor.