Upcoming Events

In 2025, the United States launched commemorations to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding. Revolutionary moments abound from this period, but the two most celebrated, rightly, are the creation of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Abraham Lincoln and his fellow Americans revered these documents that guided the republic from its founding. But he and many contemporaries also recognized a contradiction between them. While the Declaration insisted that "all men are created equal," Lincoln argued, the Constitution, created amid compromise to sustain a revolution and form a free republic, protected both liberty and slavery. It was this contradiction, Lincoln insisted, that led to "a great civil war." Nothing else had "ever threatened the existence of our Union save and except this very institution of Slavery."

It was this belief that led Lincoln and his allies to draft the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — abolishing slavery forevermore — and guide it through ratification. It was, Lincoln said, "a King's cure for all the evils" of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment, he argued, aligned the Constitution with the values of human equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which he had spotlighted a few years earlier in his famous Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

As we embark on the 250th celebrations of our nation's founding and the 160th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, it's worth taking a moment to examine how Lincoln and his fellow Americans pursued their dreams for "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Our guest scholars for the 2025 Williams Lecture — Dr. Judith Giesberg and Dr. Brandi Brimmer — will speak about the impact of the 13th Amendment in the moment, revealing how it played out in time and place for the people most directly affected by it.

This event is designed as a conversation between scholars, moderated by Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D., the Frank and Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Studies at Mississippi State University. There will be time for questions from the audience.