Session I: “A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877,” taught by Dr. John David Smith
June 1 and 3; June 8 and 10
10am – 12pm

Few subjects have captured Americans’ attention more than the Civil War and Reconstruction, events that ended African American chattel slavery and redefined American citizenship. President Abraham Lincoln and the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass played central roles in the wartime process of emancipating the South’s four million enslaved persons, eliminating state sovereignty as a political force, and recasting the idea of American nationalism.

Participants in this course will examine how Lincoln and Douglass transformed the South’s 1861 rebellion from a conflict to keep the Union intact into a war of Black liberation.

The first conversation will explore how Lincoln began the conflict determined to reunite the nation with or without slavery, while Douglass grasped the centrality of ending slavery to constructing a new nationalism including Black Americans. The second conversation will examine how the exigencies of internecine war prevented Lincoln from suppressing the South’s insurrection without freeing the slaves and making Black freedom a prerequisite for reunion. Viewing Edward Zwick’s 1989 epic GLORY will illustrate aspects of the emancipation process. The third and fourth classes will underscore how Lincoln’s successor President Andrew Johnson undercut the ideals of a new freedom for Black Americans, how radical Republicans triumphed during Congressional Reconstruction, and how reactionaries ultimately reversed course in 1876 and instituted Jim Crow. As W.E.B. Du Bois lamented in 1935: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

Meet your instructor: John David Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A Brooklyn, New York, native, he graduated with honors from Baldwin-Wallace College in 1971.  He studied Southern and Civil War history at the University of Kentucky, receiving his Ph.D. in 1977.  Smith has taught at several universities, including North Carolina State University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München.  He has lectured throughout the U.S. and in eleven foreign countries.  Smith has written and edited thirty-two books.  He has received many awards for his scholarship and teaching, including the Mayflower Society Award for Nonfiction and The Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.  He currently is writing More than Forty Acres and a Mule: Racial Reparations in American History, to be published by Oxford University Press.