Not particularly great, though there are some good sections when Foner drills into his specialties. The larger problem is the book’s premise is borderline incoherent: freedom’s myriad meanings aren’t consistent at all, at any given time lumping together a bunch of semi-related issues.

The rhetoric of “freedom” is entirely epiphenomenal to the struggles at hand, so any discussion of it is going to be either meaningless or at best subordinated to examining the forces behind its use. When Foner can do the latter, the book reaches the level of just being ok. When he can’t talk about the material forces and interests at work, like in the opening Revolutionary War sections, it comes across as someone running a google scholar search and writing up a report on the results.