Prompt A: Debate between Douglas and Lincoln 1858/ Prompt B:Union officials met with black ministers in savannah Georgia

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Short Paper II

Select ONE of the prompts below and respond with an essay of at least 400 words (about 2 pages). Your essay should include at least two quotes from the relevant primary sources.

Prompt A: In his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglass, Abraham Lincoln assured audiences that while he was opposed to the extension of slavery into the territories, he had “no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it [already] exists.” Five years later, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation and had proclaimed at Gettysburg that the Civil War was being fought to bring about a “new birth of freedom.” Why and how did Lincoln’s position shift in these five years? Your answer need not be comprehensive. Instead, it should identify two or three major developments that pushed Lincoln towards freeing the slaves in the Southern states and towards his new sense of the war’s purpose.

Prompt B: In 1865, Union officials met with twenty black ministers in Savannah, Georgia. When asked how the freedmen might best secure their freedom and independence, the spokesman for the ministers, Garrison Frazier, said the following:

“The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor… and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare.”

Did most of the freedmen in the South get the land that Frazier said was essential for freedom and independence? Did sharecropping, the economic arrangement under which many landless freedmen labored, provide independence and freedom? Were the sharecroppers truly free? In your answer, make sure to use specific examples from the sharecropping contract to make your case.