JANUARY 24, 2013
\nby Sara Morano \u201913, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took many hands to loosen the chains of slavery and many on accident.\u201d<\/p>\n
Edward Ayers, an American historian and the president of the University of Richmond, spoke about emancipation to a crowd that filled Shaw Hall of the Younts Conference Center on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
He was visiting campus amid a \u201cbusy season for Civil War historians\u201d like himself; the early part of this year when the January 1st sesquicentennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation is still being commemorated.<\/p>\n
Ayers\u2019 lecture was the keystone event for Furman\u2019s commemoration of emancipation; the Freedom Stories series and digital project<\/a> led by the History Department with the guidance of Professor Lloyd Benson.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere did freedom come from?\u201d and \u201cWho brings freedom?\u201d drove Ayers\u2019 mid-week presentation on emancipation. His \u201ccar-crash\u201d theory of history underpinned the answers he gave.<\/p>\n As the university president explained to a small group of students that dined with him before his public lecture, history must be approached with the same diligence one would use to explain a car crash.<\/p>\n As Ayers’ comparison goes, a car crash can usually be attributed to more than one cause; it was raining, the roads were slippery, the windows were foggy, the car brakes were bad and the driver had been drinking.<\/p>\n If multiple causes are appropriate to explain simple accident, then, Ayers argues, \u201cto say, \u2018Slavery caused the Civil War\u2019 is a bad answer.\u201d Thus, he explains, an incident like the Civil War that spanned four years and involved millions, is the product of thousands of individuals choices actions and causes.<\/p>\n Of course, this approach has its challenges. Putting together all these pieces is a difficult intellectual puzzle. The full picture is hard to create in a single thesis or book. Thus, innovative digital history practices have been useful to Ayers’ study of the Civil War and emancipation.<\/p>\n \u201cWe made this because we can\u2019t wrap our mind around something that size,\u201d said Ayers of his university\u2019s online accessible, \u201cVisualizing Emancipation\u201d map<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ayers demonstrated to his audience how the interactive program plots key events in the Civil War and emancipation. As users clicks through the map, they are able to search types of events, as well as sort their dates by time and place.<\/p>\n Following the blue and red dots, representing advancing armies and emancipated slaves, respectively, showed the relationship between many choices and events in real time.<\/p>\n Comprehensive digital sources allowed Ayers to support the following conclusions.<\/p>\n Competent confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who defended Richmond from an early siege by the union army, were necessary to the story of emancipation because they \u201cforced the war to go long enough that the union realized they must end slavery to end the war.\u201d<\/p>\n