Led by: Prof. James Oakes (CUNY Graduate Center)
Course Number: AMHI 640
Semesters: Spring 2020, Fall 2024
Image: A photograph of African Americans near a canal in Richmond, Virginia, by Alexander Gardner, 1865 (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC05111.01.0924)
Barely had the guns been silenced at Appomattox when the fighting over the causes of the Civil War began. Some scholars—known as “revisionists”—said that slavery had nothing to do with the war. Others—the “fundamentalists”—insisted that it was a war about slavery. Today, historians pretty much agree that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. But what does that mean? How did slavery cause the Civil War? That’s the question this course sets out to answer. We trace the origins of the war all the way back to Revolutionary America when a group of states began to abolish slavery. The conflict between the slave and free states was already present at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. So we start there, with the compromises that created a nation half-slave and half-free. And we finish in the secession crisis of 1860–1861, when eleven slave states seceded from the Union in order to protect and perpetuate slavery, and compromise was no longer possible.
James Oakes, Distinguished Professor of History, Africana Studies, and American Studies, Emeritus Faculty, CUNY Graduate Center
James Oakes, one of the leading historians of nineteenth-century America, has an international reputation for path-breaking scholarship. In a series of influential books and essays, he tackled the history of the United States from the Revolution through the Civil War. His pioneering books include The Ruling Race (1982; 2nd ed., 1998), Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (1990), The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (2007); and Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012). The latter two garnered, respectively, the 2008 and 2013 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, an annual award for the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln or the American Civil War era. His most recent book is The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (2021).
The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.