Civil War Emancipation

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The Civil War emancipated four million slaves, shifted the balance of wealth and power in the United States (at least temporarily) from the South to the North, killed roughly 700,000 Americans, and changed the lives of all who survived it. It overturned institutions, political habits, and the role of government for everyone in the nation. It raised fundamental public questions about the meaning of citizenship, loyalty, and dissent in democratic governments, and fundamental personal questions about what it meant to be a man or a woman. The war abruptly eliminated the basic social structure that defined and ordered every aspect of life in one part of the nation while dictating foreign policy for the whole country, and it neutralized one of the nation’s greatest sources of sheer wealth: slaves. At the same time, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction left unanswered questions and ambivalent legacies with which we still wrestle. In this course, we will explore the causes, progress, controversies, and consequences of the Civil War and emancipation, constantly challenging ourselves to ask and answer the question, “How do we know what we know about the Civil War and emancipation?”