From Above or Below?

"Freedom to the Slaves"
Image depicting a former slave showing his gratitude
to Lincoln

This week in our class, we discussed about the what events that lead up to the Union's eventual decision to abolish slavery in the South. For this lesson, the essential question was; Who gave freedom to enslaved Americans? Did freedom come from above or below? To what extent did Abraham Lincoln's actions
influenced by the enslaved Americans? In the case for our lesson, freedom from above was defined as freedom was granted to the slaves by the high ranking officials, whom had not experience slavery themselves. Freedom from below was defined as freedom was granted to the slaves by themselves, or former slaves.

To start this lesson off we first looked at and analyzed this portrait, depicting Abraham Lincoln almost being worshiped by a former slave for "granting" him freedom. After discussing whether the painting was accurate or not, we were then separated into small groups to examine some primary and secondary sources to support the claim of whether freedom came from above or below. Our sources were a handful of documents written by Lincoln regarding the issue of slavery, and a painting and first person account of Jefferson Davis' former slaves leaving his plantation.

Our lovely graph depicting where we thought the documents were
placed in the freedom from above or below arguement

I thought that the majority of the motivation that brought abolition, was from above rather than below. Most of the documents that were given point to the direction that the government was trying to bring abolition to the slaves of the South. Document X and Y only show that there were a couple of instances where the former slaves tried to make the issue of slavery visible to the Union.

Sherman's Saunter Through Georgia

My slide to my battle: Battle #20 Sherman's Georgia campaign

This week in our History class, we learned about the individual battles that were fought over the civil war. To help us learn about each of the battles, we created a scavenger hunt for each of the battles. For this lesson our essential question was: Who was the ultimate victor in each the theaters of war: East West, and Naval, and what are some commonalities you can identify in the reasons for the results of the battles? For this scavenger hunt, all the students were each given a battle. We were then instructed to create a short slide on the battle. The things that we included in the slides were the theater, who won, and the reasons why. The battle I was given was Sherman's Georgia campaigns. create a Qr Code for the slide, and were to print out the Qr code. We then posted these QR-code papers around the school and created a loose scavenger hunt out of it. After we finished the scavenger hunt, we created a padlet outlining all the outcomes of the battles. The padlet shows that overall the Union won the majorities of the battles that occurred during the civil war.
For the slides, we were required to

The Pad let for our class on the Civil War

Most of the theaters were inevitable wins for the Union, the western theater was dominated by the Union because of the Union's more developed supply lines, and the naval theater was Union dominated because of the near non-existence of a confederate navy. The only theater the Union didn't dominate in was the Eastern theater, but that was mostly due to the fact that the Eastern confederate generals were better that the Union's eastern leadership.  The only reason that the Civil war had the outcome that it did was because of the Union capture of the Mississippi, splicing the Confederacy in half, and the