This presentation covers the genesis, the preparation, the promulgation, the interpretations and the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation, perhaps the strangest document in American history. Discussed are the moral imperatives that inspired the war measure as well as the more concrete motives of preventing foreign intervention in the war and depleting Southern manpower—the engine that drove the Southern economy—and, the opposite side of the same coin, increasing Northern manpower, especially in Union armies. Also discussed are the Thirteenth Amendment and how the two documents were viewed by later generations of African-Americans.

The May meeting of the Round Table welcomed back to the podium Wayne Motts, chief executive officer of the National Civil War Museum. Wayne and his colleague, James A. Hessler, have written a new battlefield guide Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg: A Guide to the Most Famous Attack in American History. Wayne was prepared to tell us everything we wanted to know, and in some cases to disabuse us of things we thought we knew, about that singular event. It is…

The timing could not have been better for a 23 year old military man to write his name into the history books. On June 29, 1863, George Custer was promoted to Brigadier General and placed in command of the Michigan Cavalry Brigade. Without doubt Custer took advantage of that opportunity before, during, and after the Battle of Gettysburg. Within sixteen days of almost continual fighting Custer's Wolverine brigade would fight at Hanover, Hunterstown, East Cavalry Field, Monterey Pass, Hagerstown, Williamsport, and Falling Waters. This presentation explores not only the numerous engagements of the brigade, but also the reactions of Michigan Cavalry troopers to their youthful and newly appointed young commander.

This talk will describe in graphic detail the disintegration, during the Civil War, of Southern plantation society in a North Carolina coastal county. He will detail the struggles among planters, slaves, yeoman farmers, and landless white laborers, as well as a guerrilla war and a clash between two armies that, in the end, destroyed all that remained of the county's social structure. He will examine the failure of a planter-yeoman alliance, and discusses how yeoman farmers and landless white laborers allied themselves against planters, but to no avail. He will also show how slaves, when refugeed upcountry, tried unsuccessfully to reestablish their prerogatives--a subsistence, as well as protection from violence--owed them as a minimal condition of their servitude.

An in-depth discussion about how one of the  most important Civil War Diaries was found, how it came to be published, the genius of the young teenager who wrote it, and the amazing insights we gain from it.  LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid, the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty 12-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860--just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued to write even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865.  The War Outside My Window captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. 

A string of battlefield victories through 1862 had culminated in the spring of 1863 with Lee’s greatest victory yet: the battle of Chancellorsville. Propelled by the momentum of that supreme moment, confident in the abilities of his men, Lee decided to once more take the fight to the Yankees and launched this army on another invasion of the North. An appointment with destiny awaited in the little Pennsylvania college town of Gettysburg.

Historian Dan Welch follows in the footsteps of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac as the two foes cat-and-mouse their way northward, ultimately clashing in the costliest battle in North American history.

Based on the Gettysburg Civil War Trails, and packed with dozens of lesser-known sites related to the Gettysburg Campaign, The Last Road North: A Guide to the Gettysburg Campaign offers the ultimate Civil War road trip.