The Civil War

First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, by Francis Bicknell Carpenter (1864); oil on canvas 

This past week, Dr. Thomas Mackey of the Department of History at the University of Louisville conducted a seminar entitled “The Civil War.”  Dr. Mackey assembled a collection of documents dating from the period to better place our discussion in the proper historical context.  Scholars read primary sources from both the North and the South, including Lincoln’s July 4th Address to Congress and Jefferson Davis’ Message to the Confederate Congress, 1861.

Much of our focus centered on the Emancipation Proclamation and the role it played during the Civil War. As Dr. Mackey explained, and as the text plainly reads, Lincoln’s proclamation applied only to those areas not presently under Union control.  Neither did it apply to the border states.  In short, on the day Lincoln signed the proclamation, it freed no slaves.  Rather, proclamation added a second war-goal for the Union: that, should the Union prevail in its present struggle, the nation ought to be one without slavery.

To understand our past, we must never forget through whose eyes we ought to be looking.

Ben Shepard

Class of 2012