Burrus (Buzz) Carnahan speaks to the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia on February 12, 2013, at the Fort McNair Officers' Club in Washington D.C. on the topic: "The Historical Roots of the Emancipation Proclamation.”

For additional information about his presentation, download CWRTDC's February 2013 newsletter available at http://cwrtdc-newsletters.blogspot.com/   For information about the Round Table or to apply for membership, visit http://www.cwrtdc.org

Summary of Presentation:
Dr. Carnahan delves into the historical roots of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln declared he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it already existed," and stated that as President he would "have no lawful right to do so." Yet less than two years later, on January 1, 1863, he issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, recognizing the immediate freedom of slaves held in Confederate territory.

What led him to change his mind? Carnahan will explain how, ironically enough, the policies of Confederate President Jefferson Davis helped Lincoln develop a legal theory to justify the Proclamation. When his critics challenged the constitutional soundness of the act, Lincoln pointed to the international laws and usages of war as the legal basis for his Proclamation, asserting that the Constitution invested the president "with the law of war in time of war."

As the Civil War intensified, the Lincoln administration slowly and reluctantly accorded full belligerent rights to the Confederacy under the law of war. This included designating a prisoner of war status for captives, honoring flags of truce, and negotiating formal agreements for the exchange of prisoners -- practices that laid the intellectual foundations for emancipation. Once the United States allowed Confederates all the privileges of belligerents under international law, it followed that they should also suffer the disadvantages, including trial by military courts, seizure of property, and eventually the emancipation of slaves. While there were historical precedents for offering freedom to an enemy’s slaves in wartime, our speaker will also demonstrate that Lincoln’s action was more radical than anything that had previously been done.

Even after the Lincoln administration decided to apply the law of war, it was unclear whether state and federal courts would agree. Carnahan’s conclusion is that if the courts had decided that the proclamation was not justified, the result would have been the personal legal liability of thousands of Union officers to aggrieved slave owners. This argument offers further support to the view that Lincoln's delay in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation was an exercise of political prudence, not a personal reluctance to free the slaves. Carnahan further asserts that Lincoln was no reluctant emancipator; he wrote a truly radical document that treated Confederate slaves as an oppressed people rather than merely as enemy property. In this respect, Lincoln's proclamation anticipated the psychological warfare tactics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Introduction and Biography:
Burrus M. Carnahan is a Foreign Affairs Officer in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation at the U.S. Department of State and a Professorial Lecturer in Law at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Previously, he was a private sector consultant on international arms control issues and is an authority on international law and arms control. Carnahan served for 20 years as a lawyer in the U.S. Air Force specializing in the law of war. From 1969 to 1989 he served as a Judge Advocate in the U.S. Air Force, specializing in international legal issues. From 1974 to 1978 he was an Associate Professor of Law at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He also participated in several international negotiations on arms control. Carnahan’s JD degree is from Northwestern University (1969) and he holds an LL.M from the University of Michigan (1974).

Carnahan is the author of Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War and Lincoln on Trial: Southern Civilians and the Law of War. Both books examine the role of law in the American Civil War. He has also penned numerous articles on Abraham Lincoln, international law, and the law of war. He was the principal researcher on United States legal practice for the International Committee of the Red Cross study on Customary International Humanitarian Law (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), and was U.S. correspondent for the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law.

Additionally, he has spoken on Lincoln and his era at the Abraham Lincoln Institute Symposium at the National Archives, the Gettysburg College Civil War Institute, the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, and many other venues. In 2012, he was appointed to the Scholarly Advisory Group for President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home for a two year term.

Dr. Carnahan Speaks to the CWRTDC on the Historical Roots of the Emancipation Proclamation-2/12/2013

Robert Lee Hodge speaks to the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia on May 13 2014, at the Fort McNair Officers' Club in Washington D.C. on the topic: "Confederates in the Attic."

A PDF copy of the PowerPoint to Mr. Hodge's presentation is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/13SzkZoGlG9zLxZOWSccd_BEazPF3Yp7-/view (NOTE: For copyright purposes, the slides contained in this document vary in part from those displayed during the presentation and discussed in the audio recording).


Biography:
Robert Lee Hodge - born on Stonewall Jackson’s birthday - has had a keen interest in The War Between the States since age 4. 

For over 25 years Robert has worked in historical based films – from dramas like ABC's North and South and TNT’s Gettysburg and Andersonville, to many programs on The History Channel, Arts and Entertainment Channel, and the National Geographic Channel, to his own Civil War documentaries that have won 5 Tally awards and an Emmy in 2007. 

Mr. Hodge has been featured on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, NBC's Late, Late Show, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the PBS program Going Places, C-SPAN II, and on the National Public Radio program Soundscapes. 

He has also written for The Nashville Tennessean, America’s Civil War magazine, The Washington Post, and North and South magazine. He played a major role in the New York Times' 1998 best-selling book Confederates in the Attic (and appears on the cover) hosting Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tony Hurwitz, on an eclectic and memorable Civil War tour-de-force of historic sites.  

Mr. Hodge was a historical researcher, primarily at The National Archives and Library of Congress, working with nationally-recognized experts. He also was principle researcher on Time-Life Books 18-volume series Voices of the Civil War and The Illustrated History of the Civil War. 

 He became interested in preserving historic green space when he interned with the National Park Service's Civil War Sites Advisory Commission. Rob has organized battlefield preservation fundraisers that have garnered over $140,000 for the purchase of endangered battlefield land. He serves on the board of directors of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust, an organization that has protected nearly one thousand acres near Fredericksburg, Virginia.  

___________________________

For additional information about his presentation, download CWRTDC's May 2014 newsletter available at http://cwrtdc-newsletters.blogspot.com/   

For information about the Round Table or to apply for membership, visit http://www.cwrtdc.org

Robert Lee Hodge Speaks to the CWRTDC on the "Confederates in the Attic" - 5/13/2014

Dwight Hughes speaks to the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia about the "C.S.S. Shenandoah" on December 13, 2016, at the Fort McNair Officers' Club in Washington D.C.

Questions and answers follow the presentation.  The images used during his presentation are available at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_JohJNIN0BYqHgFoAG8bOBR2kt4XQvce

More information about the speaker is available at http://cwrtdc-audio.blogspot.com/p/hughes-audio.html

ABOUT THE TOPIC: "The cruise of a ship is a biography,” wrote the Confederacy’s foremost sailor, Raphael Semmes. A ship can be, therefore, a central character in a life story through which we view the momentous past more clearly.

From October 1864 to November 1865, the CSS Shenandoah carried the Civil War around the globe to the ends of the earth through every extreme of sea and storm. Her officers represented a cross section of the Confederacy from Old Dominion first families through the Deep South aristocracy to a middle-class Missourian: a nephew of Robert E. Lee; a grandnephew of founder George Mason; a son-in-law to Raphael Semmes; grandsons of men who fought at George Washington’s side; and an uncle of Theodore Roosevelt. 

They considered themselves Americans, Southerners, rebels, and warriors embarking on the voyage of their lives, defending their country as they understood it and pursuing a difficult, dangerous mission in which they succeeded spectacularly after it no longer mattered.

In the Pacific island of Pohnpei, Southern gentlemen enjoyed a tropical holiday while their country lay dying, mingling with an exotic warrior society that was more like them than they knew. Their observations looking back from the most remote and alien surroundings imaginable, along with the viewpoints of those they encountered, provide unique perspectives of the conflict. 

Finally, Shenandoah invaded the north, the deep cold of the Bering Sea. She fired the last gun of the conflict and set crystal waters aglow with flaming Yankee whalers. 

Seven months after Lee’s surrender, Shenandoah limped into Liverpool. Captain Waddell lowered the last Confederate banner without defeat or surrender. This is, as Admiral Semmes describes, a biography of a cruise and a microcosm of the Confederate-American experience.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dwight Sturtevant Hughes graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1967 and served twenty years as a Navy surface warfare officer on most of the world's oceans in ships ranging from destroyer to aircraft carrier and with river forces in Vietnam (Bronze Star for Meritorious Service, Purple Heart).

Lieutenant Commander Hughes taught Naval ROTC at the University of Rochester, earning an MA in Political Science; he later earned an MS in Information Systems Management from USC. In his final sea tour, he planned and conducted convoy exercises with over twenty ships of the Maritime Prepositioned Force.
 
Dwight's second career was software engineering, primarily in geographic feature naming data and electronic mapping under contract for the U.S. Geological Survey. A ridge in Antarctica is named for him in recognition of contributions to Antarctic databases and information services.

Dwight's current calling builds on a lifetime of study in naval history with the desire to translate a love of the sea and ships into an understanding of our naval heritage and to communicate that heritage in an educational and entertaining manner.
 
Dwight is a guest author at the Emerging Civil War blog. He is a life member of the U.S. Naval Institute, the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association, and the Historic Naval Ships Association. He is a member of the Naval Historical Foundation and the National Maritime Historical Society.

Dwight Hughes lives near Manassas in Virginia with his wife, Judi, a former Air Force officer and Electronics/Communications Engineer.

For more information about the speaker's book, visit http://aconfederatebiography.com/

Dwight Hughes Speaks to CWRTDC About the "CSS Shenandoah" - 12/13/2016

CWRTDC

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