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Create a Magic Lantern Show: Freedpeople in the Reconstruction South
In this activity students create a "magic lantern show," or presentation that illustrates how African American defined freedom for themselves after emancipation and the challenges and threats they faced. Students use primary sources from the [...]
What This Cruel War Was Over: Slavery and the Civil War
In this activity students will examine how attitudes towards slavery and the Civil War changed between 1860 and 1865. What began in the minds of President Lincoln and most northerners as a war to preserve the union changed, over the course of the [...]
Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris
Before the Civil War, David Golightly Harris (1824-1875) had been a small slaveholder in Spartanburg District, South Carolina. According to the 1860 census, he owned ten slaves and 550 acres of land, 100 of which he had under cultivation. Though not [...]
Forty Acres? The Question of Land at the War's End
In this activity students consider different viewpoints on whether former slaves should be given land at the end of the Civil War. Students read one of five primary sources and summarize the author's viewpoint. This activity makes a good [...]
Before-and-After Photograph of an African-American Union Recruit
This Civil War photograph shows Private Hubbard Pryor, an escaped slave from Georgia, before and after his enlistment in the 44th U.S. Colored Troops, a Union Army regiment of African-American soldiers. Congress passed legislation allowing some [...]
A Committee of Freedmen on Edisto Island Reveal Their Expectations
This letter was written by a group of freedmen to the Commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land (known as the Freedmen’s Bureau). The freedmen were from Edisto Island, South Carolina, an area that came under Union [...]
Background Essay on Why They Fought
This essay explores the motivations of soldiers on both sides of the U.S. Civil War.
Who Freed the Slaves During the Civil War?
In this activity students analyze visual and textual evidence about "contraband" enslaved African Americans during the Civil War era. They compare the roles of African Americans, the Union military, and the policies of the Republican party in [...]
A Formerly Enslaved Man Describes the Environmental Difficulties of Escape (1857)
William J. Anderson was enslaved for 24 years. In 1836, he escaped enslavement and fled from a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Anderson eventually settled in Indiana. As a free man, Anderson became a successful farm and business owner and [...]