Yale historian David Blight tackles the old classroom question of who actually freed the enslaved, using it to examine Abraham Lincoln's evolving emancipation policy during the Civil War. Delivered as Class 17 of his DeVane Lecture Series course on Yale, slavery, and its legacies, the lecture traces how Lincoln balanced constitutional constraints, military necessity, and political pressure from abolitionists and enslaved people themselves who fled to Union lines. Blight weighs Lincoln's own leadership choices against the actions of Black soldiers, runaways, and Radical Republicans who pushed the policy forward, complicating any simple story of a single emancipator. The talk fits into the course's larger argument that the Civil War's unfinished business, political, constitutional, and racial, still shapes American institutions. Blight lectures from notes with occasional reference to primary documents, delivering a dense, argument driven hour aimed at students already following the course's chronology of slavery's American legacies.