Lesson Plan The Soldier's Experience: Letters from Four American Wars 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Click to download this four-lesson unit.
Spotlight on: Primary Source John Brown’s final speech, 1859 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ On Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown led a party of twenty-one men into the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the intention of seizing the federal arsenal there. Encountering no resistance, Brown’s...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Gettysburg Address, 1863 Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ On November 19, 1863, four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, a ceremony was held at the site in Pennsylvania to dedicate a cemetery for the Union dead. The battle had been a Union victory, but at great cost—about 23,000 Union...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Western Sanitary Commission reports on suffering in the Mississippi Valley, 1863 Government and Civics 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 In 1863 in the war-torn South, thousands were homeless and starving. Some of those most in need of aid were newly liberated enslaved people. The Western Sanitary Commission was organized on September 5, 1861, by General John C....
Spotlight on: Primary Source Sharecropper contract, 1867 Economics, Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ Immediately after the Civil War, many former slaves established subsistence farms on land that had been abandoned by fleeing white Southerners. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and a former slaveholder, soon restored this land to...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Death of a soldier, 1863: Paul Semmes 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ The Civil War was the bloodiest in the nation’s history, with 618,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perishing in the war. Among the nearly 8,000 men mortally wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 were twelve commanding...
Spotlight on: Primary Source President Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, 1861 Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ On March 4, 1861, the day Abraham Lincoln was first sworn into office as President of the United States, the Chicago Tribune printed this special pamphlet of his First Inaugural Address. In the address, the new president appealed to...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Union Is Dissolved!, 1860 Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ The election of Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president of the United States in November 1860 led to the eventual secession of eleven slave-holding states and the formation of the Confederacy. Convinced that the federal government...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The "House Divided" Speech, ca. 1857–1858 Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ By 1850, the extension of slavery into the new territories won through the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 provided a testing ground for competing visions of America. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and the Kansas...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863 Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ The Emancipation Proclamation was shaped by both pragmatic considerations and Lincoln’s deeply held, lifelong hatred of slavery. It was timed, after the Union victory at Antietam, to strike a military blow against the South’s economic...