Freedom From Above or Below

Before vacation we talked about the slavery in the south and how exactly they came to be free men. The essential question was "Who 'gave' freedom to enslaved Americans? Did freedom come from above or below? To what extent were Abraham Lincoln's actions influenced by the actions of enslaved Americans?" Freedom from above is when people from higher up help the people below and freedom form below is when the people from below helps themselves. We read and analyzed six different documents to help us find the answer to who freed the slave, was it from above or below, and how much Abraham Lincoln actually had to do with it.

I believe that the freedom of slaves came from below. The slaves took it upon themselves to get what they wanted and worked their way up to make it known to the government that they would stop at nothing to be free. In Document Y (see picture below) we can see that the slaves are taking action and leaving the plantation and following the union army. Also, in Document X we see freedom from below because the fugitive slaves were first to take action by going into the city and taking things and living in empty buildings basically to make themselves a nuisance to the union so that they would have get the attention of the government to ask them what they should do about all the slaves that have overrun the city. This was smart because the union can't send them back to the south and back into slavery because they are fighting for that to stop. In the Letter to Horace Greeley you can see that freeing the slaves is completely secondary to Lincoln and that shows that he wasn't doing as much to free than the slaves were doing themselves. In the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln does declare the slaves of the rebellion states free he knows that they won't listen and it is solely to declare the war is now about slavery and that they are willing to fight for it but Lincoln didn't come to this conclusion on his own. He had been influenced by all that the slaves were doing. That shows freedom from below even though it is Lincoln speaking it is the thoughts and hard work of the slaves.

We see freedom from below all the time in our life. For example Bruce Jenner has recently decided to live the rest of his life as a women. Bruce is not the only one, there is many other people struggling with their gender identity and all these people are working on making it be more widely accepted. They are helping themselves and each other. Bruce is doing a documentary on his transition and his thought process through it all, it is an attempt to help people have a greater understanding of how exactly it works and why it is so important to the transgendered population to be accepted as who they are. By Bruce doing this he is helping other transgender maybe realize that it is okay to be who you are and helping to tell other people in the world why transgendered people do what they do. This is freedom from below because the transgendered community is helping each other to make it more widely accepted.

Here is a clip of Bruce Jenners interview with Diane Sawyer:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PwNH52S9Etw