A bit over a week behind now, but here is Day 4: The Emancipation Proclamation.
As a joke, I started by showing them this old clip from the Andy Griffith show, warning that they would one day look equally foolish if they didn't pay attention:
They thought it was hilarious.
I started by talking about Lincoln's personal views on the evil of slavery as well as his stressing at the beginning of the war that the war goal of the Union was to preserve the Union and not to act against slavery. I discussed the political reasons against moving towards emancipation: 1) it might cause the Border States to bolt the Union and throw in with the Confederacy, and 2) it might lose Lincoln the support of War Democrats who supported a war to restore the Union but not to end slavery. On the other hand, we listed reasons that moving towards emancipation might be a good idea: 1) it would secure support for Lincoln with the abolitionists, 2) it would hurt the Confederate war effort, 3) it would help persuade Britain and France to stay out of the war, and 4) it would give the Union the moral high ground in the war and help give Union soldiers an additional motivation to fight.
We discussed the early steps towards emancipation, such as the Confiscation Acts and the abolition of slavery in Washington D.C. We talked about how Lincoln was doing these things as a means of testing the waters, to see how the country would react, and how he understood the crucial importance of timing in politics, and, for that matter, in life itself.
We talked about Lincoln coming to a decision to issue an emancipation proclamation and Seward's advice to wait until a Union victory could be secured before issuing it. Some students, getting their chronology a bit off, thought that Vicksburg was the key victory, being reminded that they had jumped ahead in time a bit with the lesson on Grant. A few correctly guessed that Antietam was the victory, which led to a discussion in two of my five classes about how the appearance of something is often more important than the reality.
We discussed the complexities of how certain areas, including the Border States, were excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation and how abolitionists began undertaking work designed to help freed slaves, such as opening schools. We then moved on to a discussion of how the Emancipation Proclamation led to the enlistment of African-Americans in the Union army, a process which was helped by the work of Frederick Douglass. I discussed how U.S.C.T. regiments were organized, how they numbered roughly 180,000 men, and how they played crucial roles in such battles as the Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of Nashville. I discussed atrocities committed against black troops by the Confederates, signaling out Fort Pillow as the most famous example. I ended the class with a discussion of the 54th Massachusetts, Fort Wagner, and how William Carney became the first African-American to win the Medal of Honor.