Where Did Civil War Freedom Come From?

My history group and I made this poster during class.  It shows which documents we studied contain freedom from above and which have freedom from below.

In our most recent history lesson, we studied whether freedom during the civil war came from above or below, or rather, whether slave freedom was brought upon by the white citizens or the slaves.  To understand, we looked at several documents written during the civil war in which freedom was granted to the people.  By reading the sources, it was obvious whether freedom came from above or below. In class, we created posters (above) where we categorized the documents and decided whether they came from above or below. Freedom came from above more often in some cases, while in others, freedom came from below as the slaves started to take action to achieve what they wanted.

Engraving, “Slaves from the plantation of Confederate President
Jefferson Davis arrive at Chickasaw Bayou, Mississippi,” 1863

The first document was an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's reply to a letter by Horace Greeley.  It was written in 1862, and Lincoln was not yet focused on freeing slaves.  He was most concerned about saving the Union, and didn't care what he would have to do to achieve this. Although this is freedom from above, Lincoln was not completely set on freeing the slaves. In the second document, an excerpt from The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863, Lincoln was just focused on suppressing the rebellion, and to do so he freed slaves from border states. The slaves from southern states were not freed, but he changed this as the war progressed. In the Gettysburg address in November 1863, he said that his goal had always been to free all the slaves, although he had never admitted it.  He said that war was God's way of punishing them for having slavery for so long.  The first line of this speech illustrates that he wanted all men to be 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."Each of these examples illustrate freedom from above because Abraham Lincoln and the government were taking actions to free the slaves, and the slaves did nothing to help themselves to freedom.

Freedom from below came at different points in the war. In a letter from Union General Ambrose E Burnside to Secretary of War Edwin M Stanton in March 1863, Burnside reported that fugitive slaves were taking over the southern city he was near and that he didn't know what to do. He asked Stanton to help him with this situation because slaves had never done much before to gain freedom. This is one of the first cases freedom came from below because the slaves were taking actions to try and achieve freedom. Another instance where freedom came from below is shown in the picture on the right. In this picture, there are slaves and white men, one of which is Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The slaves are trying to gain freedom, making this an instance of freedom from below. There are fewer instances of freedom from below because often slaves needed the government to give them freedom; they couldn't do it all by themselves.

My opinion on whether freedom came from above or below is that freedom came mostly from above. I believe that the slaves, although they did do it in some cases, couldn't achieve freedom all alone. They mostly needed government officials to pass laws that made them free or took steps to achieve this. Although freedom was more effective when it came from above during the Civil War, in modern day times, both freedom from above and freedom below have been effective. A good example where freedom came from above and below over time is same-sex marriage. A constitutional right that granted this was passed in 2013, so the government had a part this freedom, but citizens had rebelled for over 50 years to help them pass it. Freedoms of all sorts are still being granted today, and these, like the examples from the Civil War, came from both above and below.

Quote is from: http://www.edline.net/files/_DMF17_/780ff3a0307aa82d3745a49013852ec4/Freedom_from_Above_or_Below_Documents.pdf