Freedom from Above or Below?

The next unit that we did in class was titled, Freedom from above or from below? The essential question from class was,"Who 'gave' freedom to enslaved Americans? Did freedom come from above or below? To what extent were Abraham Lincoln's actions influenced by the actions of enslaved Americans?" We saw an image that represented Freedom from above, and it was called Freedom of the Slaves. The next thing we did in class was we read a couple of documents, the goal of the document was to analyze the documents and find out what the goal for the war was. The last thing we did in was watch a video and answer two questions from the video. The questions were How did fugitive slaves influence the government’s and Lincoln’s actions on slavery?' and 'What did Lincoln claim that he did not do more for abolition at this point in the war?'. 

To answer the essential question we had to learn what Freedom from above and Freedom from below actually meant. Freedom from above was when people with more power and influence than the slaves helped the enslaved people gain their freedom. Freedom from below is when the slaves themselves actually work together to make a difference without a higher authority. There were times during this period in history were Lincoln definitely stepped in and helped the slaves. During the Emancipation Proclamation he stated that all men are created equal, "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Although Freedom from above did exist so did the idea from Freedom from below. The idea of Freedom from below was a big part of what the Civil war all about, document X and document Y are examples of freedom from below, Document X was a letter from General Burnside to the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, "They seemed to be wild with excitement and delight— they are now a source of very great anxiety to us; the city is being overrun with fugitives from surrounding towns and plantations— Two have reported themselves who have been in the swamps for five years.." This quote was significant because it shows that the slaves are forcing people to pay attention to them which was their man goal. Document Y Slaves from the plantation of Confederate President Jefferson Davis arrive at Chickasaw Bayou, Mississippi from 1863. This image is powerful because it shows slaves taking action and trying to make a difference by working as a unit. In my opinion there was more freedom from above because it was more common but I do think that Lincolns decisions were influenced by the actions of the enslaved people. 

 Slaves from the plantation of Confederate President Jefferson Davis arrive at Chickasaw Bayou, Mississippi 

http://mdah.state.ms.us/timeline/zone/1863/ 

Civil War scavenger hunt

Matt weber 

The next unit we learned about in the Civil War were the important battles. The essential question from class was, Who was the ultimate victor In each of the the theaters, East, West no Naval? What we did in class to learn about this was, each person from class learned about a battle and created a google doc that gave a summary of the battle which included the victor, theater and why each side won. Then each person created a bit.ly and a QR code to their Google doc so classmates could get to it. Next, we put up our google docs that we printed out around the school so our class mates had to go find them.

 Battle of Bull Run

The second essential question  from class was, who was the ultimate victor, and who won each of the theaters? The first theater is the Naval theater. The Union dominated the Confederacy in the Naval theater. Te reason for this was because the Union had a much larger navy than the Confederacy. The Union forces that had about 16,000 men, while the Confederacy had about 3,000 men. This caused the Unin to dominate the naval theater.  The Eastern theaters were mostly dominated by the Confederate, at he Confederates had the advantage in the Eastern theater becuase they were able to constantly ambush the Union and most of the time outnumber them. For example, at the second battle of Bull Run the Union lost about 13,830 troops while the Confederacy only lost about 8,350. The last theater was the Western theater, which was owned by the Western theater becasue they always outnumbered the Confederates. For example, the battle of Vicksburg and the Chattanooga Campaign. One commonalitie that I could find in the battles were that which ever theater it was in he he side with the more people usually won. In the end the Union owned two of the three theaters that there was fighting in. 

first image: http://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2014/01/Second_Bull_Run_-A.jpeg 

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