Over the past century, historians have offered a wide array of arguments about how slave emancipation came about during the Civil War. For example:
In Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935), W.E.B. Du Bois argued that when the secessionists declared war on the U.S., they freed the slaves (although, as he also pointed out, “it was the last thing [they] meant to do”).
In Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary The Civil War, Columbia University historian Barbara J. Fields asserted that during the war “the slaves freed themselves.” This and similar interpretations have been called “the self-emancipation thesis.” (This has also been a theme of this course, though not its only explanation for emancipation).
In a 1995 essay, Princeton University historian James McPherson pushed back against Fields and the “self-emancipation thesis,” writing: “By pronouncing slavery a moral evil that must come to an end and then winning the presidency in 1860, by refusing to compromise on the issue of slavery’s expansion or on Fort Sumter, by careful leadership and timing that kept a fragile Unionist coalition together in the first year of war and committed it to emancipation in the second, by refusing to compromise this policy once he had adopted it, and by prosecuting the war to unconditional victory as commander in chief of an army of liberation, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.”
An important book by the editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (1998), opens with the claim, “Freedom came to most American slaves only by force of arms.”
In an essay of 1250-1500 words, join this debate by making an argument in response to the question “Who (or what) freed the enslaved?” You are free to argue this in any way that is supported by only the course material (course material attached below). You must provide page numbers for published material that you quote or closely paraphrase. Use the shortest possible parenthetical reference, e.g. (Taylor, 84).
Where your argument embraces or modifies one (or more) of the four arguments above, you must clarify your argument’s relationship to that argument (or those arguments)—that is, you must say explicitly how you are embracing, modifying, or in some other way incorporating that argument.
You are free to quarrel with the form of the question (“Who (or what) freed the enslaved?”) and to provide an alternative question that, in your view, addresses the underlying issue(s) more effectively; in this case, you should explain (in no more than 50 words) why your version of the question is superior.
