Abraham Lincoln, Irish-Americans and the Civil War

Professor Richard Carwardine, President of Corpus Christ College, Oxford, and the only non-American winner of the Lincoln Prize for outstanding scholarship on the American Civil War, presents the 2013 Sulgrave Manor Watson Chair Lecture. 

President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which declared free the millions of slaves held in the Confederate South, signalled that the North’s war to restore the American Union had become a struggle for a more profound freedom. Nowhere did this shift in policy ask more trenchant questions of Union loyalism than amongst the soldiers and civilians of the communities of Irish Americans. This year's lecture, delivered on the day after St Patrick's Day, and in the year of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, could have no more apposite subject matter.

The Eccles Centre is pleased to co-sponsor this event with Sulgrave Manor, the home of George Washington's ancestors, and host to the Watson Chair Lecture for almost a century.  The lecture will be followed by a wine reception.