Summer Reading: Clearinghouse Staff Recommendations, Part I

Date Published
Image
cover, Steel Drivin' Man
Article Body

School's out (well, more or less—excluding professional development, workshops and conferences, and planning for next year), and more leisure time for reading may be in. Here is the first in a series of suggestions from staff at the National History Education Clearinghouse for your summertime "must read" booklist!

Race and Religion

In 1931, nine African American boys rode with hobos on a train from Chattanooga to Memphis and along the way, two white women—fearful of arrest for prostitution—claimed the Scottsboro boys raped them. Local juries found them guilty, even after the U.S. Supreme Court twice struck down the verdict and one of the two women changed her story. Kelly Schrum, Clearinghouse Co-Director and Director of Educational Projects for the Center for History and New Media, recommends James Goodman's account of the narrative of the Scottsboro boys, Stories of Scottsboro. "It's an engaging read. Goodwin is a storyteller, and he weaves together multiple perspectives and threads—often conflicting and competing—to demonstrate how we make sense of experiences." Stories from Scottsboro explores layers of meaning through the perspectives of plaintiffs and defendants, lawyers, judges, journalists, NAACP workers, and the Communist-backed International Labor Defense and links those points of view to the larger historical framework of the 1930s.

Theology and place influences how people think about race and identity.

Sharon Leon, Clearinghouse Co-Director and Director of Public Projects for the Center for History and New Media, recommends Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North by John T. McGreevy. According to Leon, "This book does a good job of paying attention to the role of place and theology in thinking about identity and race." Parish Boundaries explores the meaning of neighborhood to urban Catholics, a meaning in which geography, church, and school became inseparable. McGreevy explores how this sense of neighborhood influenced local Catholic resistance to integration—even when the Catholic church itself espoused racial equality.

Folk Songs and Material Culture

The Ballad of John Henry is perhaps the most recorded song in America—the story of the iconic railroad man who became a mythical embodiment of the heroism of the American worker. Lee Ann Ghajar, Clearinghouse Project Manager, likes Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend because it is as much a book about how to do history as it is an historical narrative. The reader travels with historian Scott Reynolds Nelson and his dog in his wife's Ford Escort in pursuit of the real John Henry—a man more likely a mistreated, rather short, convict-laborer than the gigantic hero of folk songs who died with a hammer in his hand after a mighty race against a steam drill. "You follow the historian as he follows John Henry from the early days of his research when an historic map saved Scott Reynolds Nelson from a speeding ticket into archives, libraries, census documents, and company reports. It's a great story," Ghajar explains.

Is there a relationship between early American consumerism and today?

Teresa DeFlitch, Clearinghouse Project Manager, appreciates The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities by Richard Bushman. Bushman looks at the material culture of everyday life—houses and their rooms, clothing, conversation, books, manners, entertainment and posture, for example—and discusses how changes over time illustrated changing values and the development of the American middle class. DeFlitch says The Refinement of America "vividly demonstrates the importance of material culture and landscape in history and how we use things to create identity." Bushman uses different kinds of evidence, from teacups to churches to etiquette books, to demonstrate how the refining process affected the way Americans interacted with each other. "Students can relate to the agency of consumers, even if they are from long gone centuries, and there is plenty of opportunity to use the book as a framework for teaching behavioral differences between then and now," DeFlitch concludes.

Keep Your Top Eye Open

field_image
Theodore Parker, Ballous Pictorial, November 6, 1858
Question

I have a copy of a poster from 1851 that warns the “Colored People of Boston” to stay away from constables and policemen as they are required to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. The last sentence reads, “Keep A Sharp Look Out for Kidnappers and have TOP EYE open.” What is the reference to the “Top Eye”? What does “Top Eye” mean in this case?

Answer

The original of this handbill is in the Boston Public Library’s Rare Book collection. It is part of the papers, manuscripts, and diaries of abolitionist and controversial Unitarian clergyman Theodore Parker, who composed it and had it printed and distributed.

Boston Vigilance Committee

At the time he posted it around Boston, Parker was the head of the Boston Vigilance Committee, a group of white and black abolitionists, eventually numbering more than 200, who agitated in various legal and extra-legal ways to frustrate slaveholding. The committee set up a secret network of operators on the Underground Railroad, who transported escaped slaves through the area. The committee also looked for slave-catchers in Boston who had come north to search for fugitive slaves. Parker and his fellow committee members alerted the sympathetic white and black community in the area, and sometimes threatened the slave-catchers and scared them off, and even rushed the jail to free captured slaves.

The committee’s semi-secretive efforts increased in intensity after the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (part of the Compromise of 1850), which specifically required Northern states to remit or return fugitive slaves to their Southern owners. The committee’s collective outrage peaked during the 1851 trial and return to Georgia of escaped slave Thomas Sims (the handbill is from this period), the capture and freeing of fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins in 1851, and the riots during the capture and return under Federal guard of fugitive slave Anthony Burns to Virginia in 1854.

Top Eye Open

Having or keeping your top eye open simply meant keeping a careful watch, no matter what else you were doing. It most often carried the idea that you had to keep a lookout for threatening intruders, enemies, or competitors.

The phrase appears to be an Americanism. I see written evidence for its use, among both uneducated and educated and among both whites and African Americans, as early as 1828 and as late as 1911. Those who used it probably felt it to be a bit unusual because it often appeared with quotation marks around it, as if they understood it as slang.

Today, we would say something like “keep your eyes peeled” or “keep one eye open” or “sleep with one eye open.” When you lie down to sleep, one eye is uppermost and is therefore your “top eye,” the one with the slightly better vantage point. “Top” probably also connoted “best,” so that your “top eye” was the one that could see farther and clearer.

Having or keeping your top eye open simply meant keeping a careful watch, no matter what else you were doing.

John S. Skinner, for example, in an 1828 issue of The American Farmer, counseled his readers, “So that as small sands form the mountain, and economy is said to be wealth, perhaps it would be as well to keep our top-eye open a little sharper towards those smaller items of family expenses.” The satirist John S. Robb, in a backwoods story he published in an 1845 issue of The Spirit of the Times, had one of his rustic characters say: “You, Mike, keep your eye skinned for Ingins, ‘cause ef we git deep in a yard here, without a top eye open, the cussed varmints ‘ll pop on us unawars, and be stickin’ some of thur quills in us—nothing’ like havin’ your eye open and insterments ready."

The phrase was a warning to keep your guard up, but also simply to pay close attention to what was happening so that you could forestall a threat as it arose and even shrewdly turn the situation into a favorable opportunity for your own success or profit.

Theodore Parker’s Use of the Phrase

Theodore Parker certainly understood the phrase in this way. In a speech he gave to the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, he said, “I am glad that a ‘top eye’ is open to scrutinize the acts of public men—an eye that never slumbers nor sleeps—an eye that does not spare a friend when he falters more than a foe when he is false; I am glad of that.” And in a letter he wrote in 1854, Parker facetiously chided fellow abolitionist Samuel J. May for having tried to argue that the Bible was a pacifist tract, when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary: “But all this, O father! is a delusion of Satan, who will deceive the very elect if they do not keep a top-eye open and a bright look-out.”

The phrase also had currency among other abolitionists, who used it to describe slaves who carried on with their normal activities, but constantly watched for the moment when they could act by making their escape. The Provincial Freeman in its issue of April 21, 1855, for example, used the phrase:

The cook (a colored man) having his “top eye open,” kept quiet till the steamer had fairly reached New York, then quietly procured a carriage, and apprised the property [that is, a slave onboard] that it was at liberty to assume a more independent air; consequently, it was not unconscious of the value of time; and lo! to the utter amazement of the Mate, it was seen making quick paces in the direction of the carriage.

Abolitionist activist and writer William Still, in his 1872 history, The Underground Rail Road, described the rescue of a slave, Jane Johnson, and her children, using the phrase—“Jane had her ‘top eye open,’ and in that brief space had appealed to the sympathies of a person whom she ventured to trust, saying, ‘I and my children are slaves, and we want liberty!’”

The phrase “keep (or have) your top eye open” had this meaning all during the time it was current, through the first decade of the 20th century.

Another Later Meaning of the Phrase

For about 15 years, from about 1885 to 1900, long after Parker had written his handbill, the phrase briefly developed another meaning before it dropped out of currency altogether. Liberal reformers and spiritual progressives, especially from New England, used it to refer to cultivating a new and higher angle of vision on the world. To keep or have your top eye open meant to look a little deeper into the reasons of things or to look behind the surface of everyday things, to take your eyes off the ground and look into the air, up to heaven, to look there for subtle signs and omens, to be high-minded, to be spiritual rather than materialistic, to be focused on the true and lasting rather than the false, the sensual, and the transitory, on the intuitive rather than the calculating.

Parker’s use of the phrase in 1851 has nothing in it, even implicitly, that connects it to this later meaning. However, the distant origins of the image that this later meaning captures probably lay in Parker’s friend and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Nature,” written in 1836, where he described an “exaltation” he experienced one day at twilight staring into snow puddles: "Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

"I become a transparent eyeball"

The “top eye” was the “skylight of the soul,” like the oculus at the top of the Pantheon in Rome. It saw, not the waves, but “Him who walks upon the waves,” in the words of ex-Quaker, Temperance worker and suffragist Hannah Whitall Smith. For her, opening one’s top eye was a mystical experience, a religious conversion, a reception of holiness and sanctification into one’s life. In 1883, Smith’s coworker and friend, Frances Elizabeth Willard, the President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, described Mrs. Smith’s home and family:

There is no fear of the “next thing,” because it is the next and not the last. There is no looking back, after the puerile fashion of Lot’s wife, but, with earnest gaze forward and upward, this family group moves forward, blessing and blessed. “Keep your top eye open,” is the mother’s constant motto for her children.

About the same time, Congregationalist lecturer, Joseph Cook, at one of his weekly prayer meetings at Boston’s Tremont Temple, told his audience:

British advanced thought believes in its frontal eye, but not in its coronal eye. This is a defect of the English mind and of the American. When you reach India, in your tour of the globe, you will find people who believe in their coronal eye; who see God in an intuitive way, as Emerson did. … The Scotch have an eye in the dome of their souls; but they have such an immense front window that they are chiefly occupied in gazing out of it. Rarely, except in periods of mighty religious fervor, do they look aloft through the dome. … In general, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Americans believe in experience, observation, definition, induction, the scientific method, and nothing else. You notice thus one of the defects of Anglo-Saxon advanced thought, that it sees with its front eye, and not with its top eye.

For more information

The Boston Public Library Anti-Slavery Collection.

Archer Taylor, Bartlett Jere Whiting, A Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1958.

Bibliography

John S. Robb (pseudo. Solitaire), “Fun with a ‘Bar,’ A Night Adventure on the Missouri,” in Streaks of Squatter Life, and Far-West Scenes, Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846, p. 105. Published first in The Spirit of the Times (New York), Dec 20, 1845.

“Speech of Theodore Parker at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts A. S. Society, Friday Evening, Jan. 28, 1853,” The Liberator, Feb 25, 1853, p. 2.

Theodore Parker, correspondence to Samuel J. May, March 1854, in Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Theodore Parker: A Biography, Boston: R. Osgood, 1874, p. 289.

William Still, The Underground Rail Road. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872, p. 91.

Frances Elizabeth Willard, Woman and Temperance; or, the work and workers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Hartford: James Betts, 1883, p. 198.

Joseph Cook, “Advanced Thought in England and Scotland,” Christian Advocate, Jan 18, 1883, p. 37.

Trade Routes and Emerging Colonial Economies

field_image
Newsprint, Sale of Africans from the Windward Coast, New York Public Library
Question

“What was the impact of trade routes on emerging colonies in the Americas?”

Answer

Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

These ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains between the 16th and 19th centuries

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Trade did not automatically translate into sustained development

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.

For more information

Bailey, Anne. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Beacon, 2006.

Bjork, Katherine. “The Link That Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571-1815.” Journal of World History 9 (1998): 25-50.

Bravo, Karen. “Exploring the Analogy between Modern Trafficking in Humans and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Boston University Int’nl Law Journal 25 (2007), 207-95.

Evans, Chris and Goran Ryden. Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Hart, Michael. A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002.

Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Jamestown Settlement, and Yorktown Victory Center[VA]

Ostrander, Gilman. “The Making of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Myth,” William and Mary Quarterly 30 (1973): 635-44.

Rawley, James and Stephen Behrendt. “The Coastal Trade of the British North American Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 34 (1972): 783-810.

Bibliography

Canny, Nicholas. “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1093-1114.

Price, Jacob and Paul Clemens. “A Revolution of Scale in Overseas Trade: British Firms in the Chesapeake Trade, 1675-1775.” Journal of Economic History 47(1987): 1-43.

Rawley, James and Stephen Berendt. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Spanish Colonial Trade Routes

Senatorial Division

field_image
free and slave states map
Question

When Texas became a state, did slave states have a majority in the U.S. Senate until Wisconsin entered the Union as a free state? During the three years in between Texas and Wisconsin becoming states, was the South able to take advantage of their numbers in the Senate? Also, when California entered the Union as a free state, did it send pro- and anti-slavery senators to Washington?

Answer

After the War of 1812, the northern, free states' members in the House of Representatives exceeded those from slave states. The slave states reckoned then that Congress could try to outlaw slavery in the South. Their representatives in the House had tried to stave off attempts by that chamber to legislate the abolition of slavery by instituting a "gag rule" which, for years, had blocked abolitionist petitions from reaching the floor of the House, but which had been rescinded in 1844. The South therefore worked out a strategy to ensure that they would not be outnumbered in the Senate. If they maintained a balance in the Senate, they figured, attempts to force the end of slavery on the southern states could be blocked.

To maintain this balance as new territories were admitted into the Union, slave states and free states were admitted, roughly speaking, in pairs: Mississippi and Indiana, Alabama and Illinois, Missouri and Maine, Arkansas and Michigan, and Florida and Iowa. In some cases, the admission of a state was slowed or sped up in order to pair it with another. This practice was the outcome of a strategy that the South considered essentially defensive. The South's primary aim in this was not so much to spread slavery as it was to protect slavery where it already existed. To do that, it had to protect its strength in the Senate, and for that to happen as northern territories were brought into the Union, the South had to find southern territories to balance them. Eventually, this even led some in the South to look for possible ways to annex Cuba and Nicaragua and bring them into the Union as slave states.

Texas and Wisconsin were considered to be a pair. Partly due to objections of northern abolitionists who feared that the admission of Texas by itself would tilt the Senate balance in favor of the South, the Lone Star State's entrance into the Union was delayed until December 29, 1845, and only happened then because of the successful Democratic campaign of 1844 that succeeded in electing James Polk to the White House on a platform that combined a call for admitting Texas into the Union with an expansionist stance on the question of setting the northern territorial claims of Oregon as far as possible. The northern vote was split in that election, between Whig candidate Henry Clay, Liberty Party candidate James Birney, and James Polk (partly because of his party's position on Oregon), giving the election to Polk.

There was a strong effort to bring Wisconsin into the Union in 1846, along with Iowa, but Wisconsin was not admitted until May 29, 1848. Did that make the Senate balanced in the South's favor between the time of the admission of Texas and the admission of Wisconsin? Not really. For one thing, the balance in fact was volatile.

For example, although Iowa had been admitted to the Union as a free state on December 28, 1846, political turmoil in its state legislature, almost evenly divided on party lines, and spiced by accusations of bribery, resulted in the state's inability at first to elect U.S. Senators to send to Congress. In addition, party politics factored into votes, with northern Democrats, for example, sometimes voting with their southern colleagues. Nevertheless, a rough parity existed in the Senate, although the South recognized it as tenuous.

South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun's speech in the Senate on February 19, 1847, described the situation in which the South perceived itself at the time:

Sir, already we are in a minority—I use the word 'we' for brevity sake—already we are in a minority in the other House, in the electoral college, and, I may say, in every department of this government, except at present, in the Senate of the United States—there, for the present, we have an equality. Of the twenty-eight States, fourteen are non-slaveholding and fourteen are slaveholding, counting Delaware, which is doubtful, as one of the non-slaveholding States. But this equality of strength exists only in the Senate. … We, Mr. President, have at present, only one position in the government, by which we may make any resistance to this aggressive policy which has been declared against the South; or any other, that the non-slaveholding States may choose to take. And this equality in this body is of the most transient character. Already, Iowa is a State; but, owing to some domestic calamity, is not yet represented in this body. When she appears here, there will be an addition of two Senators to the Representatives here, of the non-slaveholding States. Already, Wisconsin has passed the initiatory stage, and will be here at next session. This will add two more, making a clear majority of four in this body on the side of the non-slaveholding States, who will thus be enable to sway every branch of this government at their will and pleasure. But, sir, if this aggressive policy be followed—if the determination of the non-slaveholding States is to be adhered to hereafter, and we are to be entirely excluded from the territories which we already possess, or may possess—if this is to be the fixed policy of the government, I ask what will be our situation hereafter?

Calhoun was reacting here to the introduction of the "Wilmot Proviso," an attempt by northern anti-slavery congressmen to ban slavery in all territories that would enter U.S. possession in the future. Far from seeing itself at this point as capable of taking advantage of its senatorial strength, the South—as is clear from Calhoun's speech—saw itself as barely able to hold its defenses against an aggressive North intent on outlawing slavery everywhere. In his speech, Calhoun calculated that if all the territories were thenceforth brought into the Union as free states, the slave states would be outnumbered in the Senate by two to one.

The Wilmot Proviso was defeated in the Senate—that was as close as one could say that the South was able to "take advantage of" its strength there—but the battle over it served to turn opposing political forces further into sectional differences, North versus South, free state versus slave state. By doing this, it also helped to redefine the politics of the time away from party affiliation and loyalty to sectional affiliation. Both the Whigs and the Democrats underwent fragmentation and inner realignments during this period.

When California was admitted on September 9, 1850, its formal admission came only five days after the passage of the bills that formed the Compromise of 1850. As part of the Compromise, California came in as a single free state, rather than divided into two parts, one free and one slave, but Utah and New Mexico territories were organized to allow popular votes in the territories to decide later whether slavery would be permitted. In point of fact, the admission of California did not immediately change the balance of anti- vs. pro-slavery votes in the Senate because California, although a free state, sent one anti-slavery senator and one pro-slavery senator to Washington.

Bibliography

William J. Cooper, Jr. The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828-1856. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Jonathan Halperin Earle. Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Eric Foner. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

William W. Freehling. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay 1776-1854. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990-2007.

Michael F. Holt. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Norton, 1983.

Allan Nevins. Ordeal of the Union: Fruits of Manifest Destiny 1847-1852. 4 vols. New York: Collier Books, 1992.

Leonard L. Richards. The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination 1780-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Joel H. Silby. Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Images:
Map of the United States, showing the free and slave-holding states, 1857. Slave Heritage Resource Center.

"United States Senate, A.D. 1850," drawn by P. F. Rothermel, 1855. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

With or Without Slavery?

field_image
map of Lecompton, 1858
Question

If the Lecompton Constitution version that would have allowed no further importation of slaves had won, would children born to the slaves already in Kansas still be considered slaves as well as their children into the future?

Answer

In the fall of 1857, the Kansas Territory's proslavery legislature met in the town of Lecompton and worked out a constitution, which it proposed to put up for a vote. The vote, however, was only between "the constitution with slavery" or "the constitution without slavery."

The proposed constitution was written in such a way that a vote "for the constitution without slavery" still allowed the residents of Kansas to keep the slaves they owned, while preventing new slaves from entering the territory.

Anti-slavery voters boycotted the referendum and consequently the "constitution with slavery" passed by a large margin. Kansas voters, however, eventually elected a new legislature and defeated the Lecompton Constitution. In 1859, they ratified the Wyandotte Constitution that outlawed slavery.

Article 7, Section 1, of the Lecompton Constitution stated that "… the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and its increase is the same and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever." The slave's "increase" meant the children of the slave, so they would still have been considered slaves, as would those slaves' children into the future.

For more information

Manuscript of the Lecompton Constitution

Thomas Goodrich. War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998.

Bibliography

Images:
"Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Free Soiler," 1856 political cartoon, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Detail of a map of Douglas County, Kansas Territory, 1858, showing the town of Lecompton.

Detail of an engraving of the town of Lecompton, 1859, Kansas State Historical Society.

Model Professional Development: Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

Video Overview

Ford's Theatre Society's Sarah Jencks leads a group of TAH teachers through analysis of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. After taking a close look at Lincoln's techniques in the speech, the teachers engage in a roleplaying activity, suggesting the reactions of a selection of historical characters to the speech and to Lincoln's assassination.

Video Clip Name
Fords1.mov
Fords2.mov
Fords3.mov
Fords4.mov
Video Clip Title
Analyzing the Second Inaugural: Part One
Analyzing the Second Inaugural: Part Two
POV Activity: Part One
POV Activity: Part Two
Video Clip Duration
7:03
7:58
7:05
7:27
Transcript Text

Sarah Jencks: First take: What are some of the things you notice, both about the content, what he’s saying, and also about the way he goes about saying it? Just a quick phrase or what words or phrases stick out to you here?

Teacher: Well, there’s some old Biblical references.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah, he calls on the Bible a lot, absolutely

Teacher: That’s strange for us in the 21st century

Sarah Jencks: And he also, it’s clear he assumes people know that those quotes are from the Bible, right, because he doesn’t say these are Bible quotes, he just does it. What else?

Teacher: He brings sort of a why he said some things in the first inaugural address and how this is going to be different, lays out and prepares for what he’s going to say.

Sarah Jencks: He definitely starts off by saying this is a new day, this is a different time. Absolutely. What else? What other things do you notice in here? Yeah.

Teacher: Malice towards none is sort of the start of the Reconstruction.

Sarah Jencks: So yeah. So at the very end of the speech, he’s definitely moving forward and he’s setting a tone for what his expectations are. Absolutely. What else?

Teacher: I think he reaffirms the notion that we’ve seen since the Emancipation Proclamation, that originally the war was about preserving the Union, but now he’s very clear that it was about ending slavery.

Sarah Jencks: Absolutely. Yeah, he really states it. He even goes further than that. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. What else? What else do you notice? Anything about the structure?

Teacher: I’m just struck by the rather severe comment that God wills the retribution.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah, there’s nothing light or casual about this middle paragraph. Anything else? Okay, let’s try to take a second pass at this, and as we’re doing it, I want you to think about those things, about the references, the Biblical references, and let’s also—we’ll pay attention to these different paragraphs. He starts by saying it’s a new day, then he goes into talking about what it was like in the country at the beginning of the Civil War in the next paragraph, and then he goes into this really intense paragraph about slavery and about why this war—he’s got an idea why this war happened. And then moving us towards post-war times. And just quickly I want to remind you, do you all know what the day was that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated? Do you remember?

[Murmuring answers]

Sarah Jencks: April 14th. He was assassinated on the 14th, he died on the 15th. And what is this date right here?

March 4th. So it’s how much earlier? Yeah, just like a month and a half. It’s not much. He hardly had a second term.

Teachers reading: Fellow-Countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

Sarah Jencks: Okay, let’s stop for a second and talk about some of the things he’s doing in this first paragraph. It’s funny, I’ve been doing this for three years, and I just noticed a new thing, so what, what are some of the—he’s very skilled in the way he’s structuring this. What are some of the things that he’s doing in this first paragraph. How is he—what is he trying to do as he introduces this speech? What do you see?

Teacher: Well, ’high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.’ Like, he has a plan, he’s not quite sure how it’s going to go and how it’s going to be accepted.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah, and, you know, that’s the part that I just noticed something for the first time. He doesn’t ever say in this speech, and the Union is going to win, which was clear by then. It was clear by March 4th that the Union was going to win. Why wouldn’t he say that? Why might he choose not to say that in this speech? Given what else he knows?

Teacher: He feels he’s a president of all the states.

Sarah Jencks: He doesn’t want to stick it to the South. He’s specifically saying no prediction is ventured, I’m not going to go there. It’s an interesting way for him to start this.

Teacher: So he’s already thinking about healing.

Sarah Jencks: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, we’re not going to start this speech by saying we’re winning, we’re doing it.

Teacher: Well, he even has sense before, ’reasonably satisfactory,’ he doesn’t go jump and say that we’ve won, pretty much, it’s very—

Sarah Jencks: I just heard, I’m sorry, I don’t know—yes. Yeah. And very measured. He’s very careful how he does that.

Teachers reading: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

Sarah Jencks: Okay, let’s stop again. Um, he’s still talking about the previous inauguration and the beginning of the war here, and he does a lot of this ’then and now.’ If you notice, in the first paragraph, he says ’then the statement seemed fitting and proper, now, we don’t need it anymore.’ So, what do you notice about this paragraph, what are some of the things you notice about what he’s saying at this paragraph? I’m going to say one—are there any hands back there that I’m missing? Yes.

Teacher: I was just going to say he’s very balanced. He’s not placing blame. And, you know, in these last few sentences, he states what one party did, then what the other party did, and then response one party did, and the other party did. He’s very—it gives a very balanced perspective.

Sarah Jencks: And what’s the—this is just a little grammar thing that I sometimes do with kids when I’m looking at this. In that very last clause of the paragraph, who’s taking the action?

Teacher: The war itself.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? It’s not a person on either side. It’s the war is the subject.

Teacher: And he also does a similar thing by saying that insurgent agents, he’s not saying the whole South, the government, you know, or the leaders of the South, like agents, like I know it’s not everyone, it’s just these few.

Sarah Jencks: And he also says in that second sentence, notice the way he says all dreaded it, all sought to avert it. Nobody wanted war.

Teacher: I think he does nail, though, who he feels started it.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah, yeah. It’s true.

Teacher: Makes it clear.

Sarah Jencks: It’s true. He says one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive. And the other would accept it. No, you’re absolutely right, you’re absolutely right. I mean, he’s not saying nobody’s responsible here, but he is really being careful about the way he phrases it. Um. We’re ready to keep going.

Teacher: Okay.

Sarah Jencks: Okay.

Teachers reading: One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

Sarah Jencks: Okay, I’m going to stop us here, because this is a really long paragraph. What’s he doing here? He’s moving on from talking about what happened at the beginning and who was responsible. He’s going a little deeper here. What’s he doing?

Teacher: He’s kind of always said that the cause of the war was to save the Union, but here he’s saying that even though we always said it was to save the Union, we knew that this was slavery and this institute had something to do with it.

Sarah Jencks: And who knew? According to him?

Teacher: Everybody.

Sarah Jencks: Everybody. He does it again. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of war. He’s not letting anyone off the hook here. What else? Do you recognize any language here, from other studies of slavery or anything?

Teacher: A peculiar institution.

Sarah Jencks: Exactly. A peculiar and powerful interest. Absolutely. And I think it’s really interesting the way he says to strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object to which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war. I love that image, his use of that word, to rend the Union, because I always think of sort of tearing fabric or something.

Teacher: He’s also in the next part of that sentence talking about, you know, I didn’t say that I was going to abolish slavery at the beginning, I was not—I was going to let the states deal with it, the territory. He says, hey, you know.

Sarah Jencks: Other "than to restrict the territorial enlargement." Part of what I like about this speech also is that it sort of like gives you like, the whole history of, you know, the early part of the 19th century. He addresses so many issues that you can then make connections to.

Okay, let’s keep going.

Teachers reading: Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.

Sarah Jencks: Okay, stop for just a second. What is he saying here? He’s addressing something that happened in January 1865 here. The cause of the conflict should cease before the conflict itself should cease. Does anybody know? Do you remember from down—

Teachers: The Emancipation Proclamation.

Sarah Jencks: The Emancipation Proclamation, yes, that was in 1863. January 1865, the Congress passed the 13th Amendment. And so it hadn’t been ratified yet, it wasn’t ratified until December 1865, but it had been passed by Congress. And so he lived to see that happen, and that was yet another sign that it was—we were in the endgame.

Teachers reading: Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

Sarah Jencks: I love that sentence because the kids often, they think, they’re not used to these words being used in such a powerful way. A result less fundamental and astounding. Just changing the whole country. Keep going.

Teachers reading: It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Sarah Jencks: Okay, let’s stop again. So he’s making a transition here from determining what the cause of the war was to what? What’s going on here?

Teacher: It’s in God’s hands.

Sarah Jencks: It’s in God’s hands. Where do you see that?

Teacher: It’s just the [unintelligible] that I’m getting from the actual—the whole Bible and everything else, it’s just kinda like this is fate now.

Sarah Jencks: He’s doing something more here with that. The way he was using 'all' before, he’s using—do you see he’s using that here as well? What words does he use here to bring people together?

Teacher: Neither.

Sarah Jencks: Neither and also—does anybody see anything else?

Both. Yep, neither and both. He’s bringing everybody—he’s saying, we may not be seeing this from the same perspective, but we’re all seeing it together.

Teacher: And I take that both sides here have lost. Neither side is jumping for joy.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And he really is bringing everybody together. Let’s talk about that dig for a second. What’s his dig here?

Teacher: That the prayers of both could not be answered.

Sarah Jencks: The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. They could—we can’t—we’re not—we’re not going to be satisfied. What’s he—his previous sentence, though, may seem strange.

Teacher: Yeah.

Sarah Jencks: What’s going on in that sentence? Anybody want to read it aloud again? Somebody just go ahead. Go ahead.

Teacher: Uh, okay. ’It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.’

Teacher: Is that a dig against slavery, then?

Teacher: Yeah.

Sarah Jencks: What’s he—how do you take that?

Teacher: You’re making money from someone else’s work.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah. But who do you think he’s talking to there?

Teacher: I think to the South.

Sarah Jencks: You think he’s talking—okay, tell me more about that.

Teacher: Slaveowners.

Sarah Jencks: Slaveowners. Okay. And the workforce. Think about the Northerner here, for a second. Why might that sentence—and I’m just thinking of this right now, so don’t think I’m so far ahead of you here. Why might that sentence be addressed to a Northern audience?

Teacher: He’s critical in that the Northerners really didn’t maybe speak up more loudly against it, that they even have labor issues themselves.

Sarah Jencks: Remember he quotes the Bible here, though. He says it may seem strange that slavery exists, but, let us judge not, that we be not judged. So yeah, he’s bringing up issues of labor in the North, and he’s saying hey, you Northerners, you abolitionists, you may think those Southerners are pieces of white trash, but let us judge not so that we be not judged. You’re not God. It’s interesting because he’s got many many audiences here, and we’re going to be playing with that in the minute.

Teacher: I was thinking similar to the reference that he used, let he who casts the first stone be without sin, so, you know, it seems like another Biblical reference or reference to that part of the Bible.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s keep going. Let’s go.

Teacher: Woe—

Sarah Jencks: My apologies for cutting you off.

Teacher: It’s okay. ’Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’

Sarah Jencks: What does this mean? What does this Biblical quote mean? Let’s break it down, because it’s not an easy one. ’Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’

Teacher: I mean, to go back to the Biblical language, he’s saying something along the line of it’s a shame that we have to live in a world of sin, this is a sinful world, so we should feel sorry for ourselves, and this is a place where sin is going to happen, but God help the sucker who commits the sin.

Teacher: Yeah.

Teacher: Bad things happen, but this could have been avoided.

Sarah Jencks: Right, and also you’d better not be the one who’s actually doing it. Yeah, absolutely, and what he’s doing, it almost looks here like he’s setting up the South, but then let’s see what comes next.

Teacher: You wonder if there’s a little confusion in the speech. He starts out saying it’s about saving the Union, then he ends up saying, well, this is really about retribution for slavery. Which is it?

Sarah Jencks: It’s the big question of the Civil War, isn’t it?

Teacher: It strikes me, realistically, you can’t have it both ways, even though he wants it that way.

Teacher: Couldn’t you read it, though, as more of a superficial understanding—

Teacher: Superficial is my middle name.

Teacher: No, no, I mean, the whole thing about preserving the Union, that sort of, you know, the reading of it, initially, but then, you know, we spent the whole week studying Lincoln and how he agonized over this stuff in his summer retreat and then at a deeper level, he’s looking for a more meaningful way to frame the whole thing, so that it’s not necessarily contradictory, but just deeper readings of the same situation.

Sarah Jencks: I would throw out to you also that Abraham Lincoln was the consummate politician. He was a great leader. That’s separate from his having been a great politician. And that he was very conscious of the laws of the land and the way that he handled this war in the first half of the war. And in the second half, he started to become much—he was looking for a deeper meaning. For himself, with the death of his son and the death of all of these soldiers, whom he was mourning. And he really started drawing on—looking for a deeper meaning in a different way. So that doesn’t answer your question.

Teacher: Back in the 19th century, didn’t most Americans, or at least, you know, the elites believe that democracy was a divine act? I mean, Reagan wasn’t the first person to say that United States was a city on the hill. You know, you’ve got Melville[?] and all these other guys referring to it that way, so for Abraham Lincoln, couldn’t that also be the case. That to preserve the Union was to keep God’s purposes, God’s will going on Earth, because as long as democracy was there, justice could be done.

Sarah Jencks: That’s really interesting. Yeah, and that was, it was Winthrop, it was that early on, the city on the hill concept started.

Teacher: Remember that, yesterday, talking about how the Declaration of Independence was the apple, yeah, the Constitution is the rain. Goes right back to that.

Teachers reading: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Teacher: I mean, this is what brings the whole thing full circle. From the introduction, what Mike said about it started out trying to preserve the Union. Yes, slavery was a major part of it, but, I think, you know, events change people. You’ll have a belief when you’re a younger person and then as you get older and as experiences start to mold and shape you, you start to—especially having a child or something else—it makes you think differently. And this war, with the loss of his own child and the loss of all these mother’s children, changed him. So he needed to get back to a place that brings us back together.

Sarah Jencks: I see also that he’s using this whole Biblical kind of exegesis almost to set up what he says in the last paragraph. Because if none of us are responsible, then we have to move forward, we have to strive on with malice towards none and charity for all. We can’t hold it against anyone.

Teacher: Especially when he said back a few sentences before that both sides have committed sins during the course of this war.

Teacher: Yet does he really say that nobody’s responsible, or does he say that we’re all responsible. I sort of get the sense he’s saying that we’re all responsible.

Sarah Jencks: Yes, I agree with you. I totally agree with you. We are all responsible.

Teacher: But he still names the insurgents.

Sarah Jencks: Yes.

Teacher: We’re still pointing the finger somewhere.

Teacher: I still wonder, to what degree does Lincoln himself take personal responsibility for all this tremendous loss. I mean, in the first inaugural, I lot of you are remembering, he said, I’ve taken an oath to preserve the Union. So I’m this passive agent, essentially, and I must follow my oath. But of course he didn’t have to follow his oath exactly as he saw it. He had other choices.

Teacher: And I think—

Teacher: What do you think?

Teacher: He wasn’t passive. You know, he used the Constitution to his benefit and that other times he expanded powers in it and stretched things and kind of toyed with it in order to achieve a goal. And you’re saying he’s a master politician, he wasn’t just—he wasn’t, in my opinion, this ’I’m a moral person that’s just following my oath,’ he was very deliberate in what he did, he was very calculated in what he did, and the way things that he followed in the Constitution, things that he chose to kind of stretch a little bit, it was all for his kind of for his goal to win the war.

Teacher: Very Machiavellian. Ends justify means.

Sarah Jencks: One of the phrases that I find really powerful from—I don’t know if you all are ever trying to make these connections, I can’t imagine you’re not, but I’m always looking for those threads that sort of go through the 19th century or follow from the Declaration, you know, the different political threads, through to the Civil War and beyond, and Lincoln was a great follower of Daniel Webster, the Whig politician. And one of Webster’s phrases, or his sayings, which is actually on the wall of the National Constitution Center if you ever get to go up there in Philadelphia, it’s ’one country, one Constitution, one destiny.’ And they were struggling with these same issues in, you know, the middle and the early part of the 19th century, too. It didn’t just happen.

Teacher: [Unintelligible]—time we were a country—

Sarah Jencks: Yeah. You’re absolutely right. And so Webster said that. Well, if you go down to the coat in the lobby, Lincoln had those words, ’one country, one destiny,’ embroidered in his overcoat. Literally, an eagle of the Union, with the words ’one country, one destiny,’ embroidered in his overcoat.

Sarah Jencks: So what I’d like to do is to start off by looking at some of the things, specific things that might have been, you know, when we hear presidential speeches and other speeches today, commentators and even regular people can see things, and then you think, oh my gosh, I see they said that, that’s going to be—that’s a buzzword or there’s that kernel of an idea, it’s going to keep going forward, I know it’s going to be an issue.

And so the idea here is to partner up and to look for, to try to articulate, we’ve talked a lot about these, but the theory, the sort of proposition about the war that Lincoln makes, and then, secondly, what the policy is that he’s proposing. He makes a statement of a proposition of what the war was all about, and then he proposes a policy.

Teacher: These two people get along fantastically—this person didn’t want to fight the war at all. This person didn’t want a war that would disrupt the institution of cotton and slave [uncertain], because his livelihood would be

Teacher: Right—

Teacher: But he could always turn a blind eye to how the cotton was being produced.

Teacher: Alright, so the theory we’re going with is that there’s blame to go around, right?

Teacher: Right, and the South is not going to be punished. And I guess that’s what she was getting to, in order to understand what happens next, why Lincoln’s assassination was a tragedy is because we know that Reconstruction went in a million different directions.

Teacher: The war is God punishing us for slavery.

Teacher: No, all parties are [unintelligible].

Teacher: Right. Because, I mean, he’s really not talking a lot here about the war to preserve the Union, to preserve states’ rights, he’s really focusing on the slavery issues a lot more.

Sarah Jencks: I call these the POV cards, your point-of-view cards. I want to first ask you, does anybody feel particularly good about what you wrote, not to show off, but you feel like you could—you’d be willing to share with us either your theory or your policy and/or did it bring up any questions that anyone wants to raise with the—

Teacher: We kind of felt that people of the North who really felt that they were sort of fighting to fight would see this as controversial. What do you mean we shared the blame, you know, we don’t have slavery, we’re trying to preserve the Union, and now you’re telling us that we’re partly to blame. I think maybe that’s where some of the controversy lies.

Sarah Jencks: Interesting. Okay. Yes.

Teacher: We also felt that neither the North, kind of going on what Nancy said, that neither the North nor South is going to be happy with his plan of no blame and that, you know, he wanted to move quickly, like the South now is going to be forced to join the Union, which they’re going to be upset about, and the North is going to be angry that they’re not, you know, held as this victorious winner, that he’s really got enemies on both sides now.

Teacher: Northerners don’t want to accept Southerners, Southerners don’t want to accept Northerners, and that 10% loyalty cutoff[?] of which 90% of the population in that Confederate state doesn’t want to be there.

Sarah Jencks: Did any—I don’t know how much you all got to talk about or you read about in the basement museum the election of 1864. What were Lincoln’s chances? What happened? Can anybody sort of revisit that?

Teacher: I think it depended on victory.

Teacher: Yeah.

Sarah Jencks: I’m sorry, say it again?

Teacher: Well, it depended on victory.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah, military victory. So, how was he doing before Sherman started succeeding in the fall? Yeah, it was not looking good. It was all over.

And there are amazing images, again, of what happened on the Library of Congress website and on other places, in Atlanta and Savannah. And at the same time just remember, you know, if he hadn’t done that, where would we be? It’s a conundrum. It’s a little bit like the conundrum, when you investigated, of should we have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?

Teacher: Well, Grant as well. I mean Mike was talking about should Lincoln take the responsibility of the death toll, where if you look at a Sherman or a Grant, their strategy was attrition and just keep throwing bodies at the problem until they run out of bullets.

Sarah Jencks: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of controversy over what the best military practice is here. We do a play called The Road from Appomattox and it’s a meeting between Grant and Lee the day after the surrender, which we know took place. We don’t know what happened in it, but we know it took place. Or at least in their memoirs they both say it took place. And one of the things that Lee says is this is the last war that will ever be fought according to conventional rules of war as we know them. And I think that was true in many ways. So.

Sarah Jencks: What else? What else is coming through here, in terms of the controversy of his theory, his controversial theory, or what his proposal was. What is the policy that he’s beginning to articulate here? Maybe we can move on to the policy. Yes.

Teacher: The whole ’malice towards none, charity for all’ is remarkable.

Sarah Jencks: So what’s he saying there? If you were thinking of it from policy terms?

Teacher: Well, it’s directed towards the South. We’re not going to hang the leadership like many wanted to do up north, and after four years of hell, that’s pretty remarkable, that he would keep that focus, on reuniting the country.

Sarah Jencks: Just to repeat myself, is it just directed towards the South, do you think? I mean, what about those Northerners?

Teacher: Stop looking for revenge.

Sarah Jencks: And the border states, it was a really big issue. As you begin to look at Andrew Johnson, one of the issues that we come up against with Andrew Johnson is that he was from a border state. He had been holding out for four years, as a member of the Union, as a legislator and a senator from a state that, essentially, had seceded. But he was maintaining his presence, which was why he was named vice president in the 1864 election. From a state that essentially had seceded from the Union, Tennessee. He was full of vengeance. He couldn’t have been more the opposite of Lincoln.

Sarah Jencks: So having thought about these two, having articulated this theory and then the resulting policy he’s proposing, I want you to take a look at these different Americans—almost all of them are Americans, one is not an American—that you have in front of you on these POV cards. And by the way, I have one more—if anybody needs one, I have one more. And take a moment to think both about how they would have responded to the speech and then, as a follow-up, how they would have responded to the assassination.

Abraham Lincoln’s family was from Kentucky, originally, and they—his parents left their Baptist church because it was pro-slavery and they were not. So these are—and even if you can’t make a clear decision, start to think of what the questions are, you know.

Okay, in his very last speech before he was assassinated, Lincoln proposed that what he described as ’very intelligent Negroes’ and those who had fought for the Union should be eligible for the vote.

Teacher: Okay.

Sarah Jencks: So. . . .

Teacher: That would give hope, but—

Teacher: Yeah.

Teacher: But this is after the assassination, right?

Sarah Jencks: What happened in South Carolina afterwards actually was that it became the state with the most black legislators during Reconstruction.

Teacher: Right.

Sarah Jencks: Right, so. . . .

Teacher: And that only lasts about 10 years.

Sarah Jencks: Right. Not even. Alright, so. Good questions you guys are bringing up, though.

I’m not going to ask you to tell—to go around and say what your person would have thought. But instead, if you want to reflect on some of the questions that you were struggling with or that came up or some of the issues that you had to ask—

Teacher: How about if we know what the person would have thought?

Sarah Jencks: If you know? If you feel certain, then I think you should say what were some of the things that made you know. Okay?

Alright. Go ahead. Whoever wants to start, raise your hand or just shout out. Anybody? Okay.

Teacher: Well, we got Andrew Johnson the [unintelligible] legislator from Tennessee, so we already know that he was a little angry and wanted revenge, but was politically-minded enough to go with Lincoln until, you know, his time came.

But then because I mouthed off, she gave me another one. And this one was a white merchant in San Francisco, formerly of Delaware. Apparently Delaware was a very small, slaveholding state—

Sarah Jencks: Yeah, but border state.

Teacher: —and this gentleman moved to San Francisco, obviously probably during the Gold Rush, so our idea was we really don’t think this guy cares. He’s in San Francisco, he’s trading, he’s involved with all sorts of ethnic groups and nationalities and he’s there just to make money. So I really don’t think his political opinions are going to be very strong, since he moved from a very small state to a state with more people where there could be more opportunity.

Sarah Jencks: But California came—was strongly in which camp during—

Teacher: In the free state category—

Sarah Jencks: In the free state category.

Teacher: —since the Compromise of 1850.

Sarah Jencks: Okay. Excellent. Good thoughts. What else? Who else? What did you—what were you thinking about as you were going through this process?

Teacher: Right. We were a white Georgetown DC dockworker. We’re wondering why we were unable to fight, but—

Sarah Jencks: Maybe you had like a leg that had a—you broke your leg when you were little.

Teacher:: You have to build your character.

Teacher: Our options are really limited, so we’re really worried now with the freeing of slaves, because all this cheap black labor is going to be coming up from the South and if this—if what you’re saying is basically our case, we have very few options economically to turn to. So if we lose this job. . . .

Sarah Jencks: Not to mention that the Potomac River is about to silt up and there isn’t going to be a dock in Georgetown in 10 years, but you don’t know that.

Teacher: Man.

Sarah Jencks: What else?

Teacher: I just thought it was interesting how you guys think about their reaction to the speech and then to the assassination, and the role that we had was a Massachusetts writer with strong abolitionist ties. And we have very different reactions to the speech and the assassination, that, you know, they’re disillusioned by the speech, and this is not enough. You know, you’ve soft-pedaled down, you’ve taken more of a centrist stance. But the assassination still devastates them because this is, you know, your revered leader who did speak out.

Sarah Jencks: Interesting.

Teacher: We also struggled as an abolitionist with the idea of, you know, having a religious sort of approach to this whole thing, would we have been insulted that, okay, now we’re being lumped in with the sinners who perpetrated this horrible institution, and how dare you try to make us be with them. And then maybe we become more zealous once Lincoln was assassinated—see, now you didn’t want to punish them, now they killed the president on top of it, just sin upon sin on the South, and I’m not part of that. You know, even more stronger regional identity of not wanting to be seen as part of that bigger—

Sarah Jencks: Yeah. Very interesting.

Teacher: And one of our controversies was, just because you’re an abolitionist didn’t mean you believed in equal rights.

Sarah Jencks: So true. That’s so true. Absolutely. There were a lot of Northerners who did not—we sort of tend to say that the Northerners were oh, they were antislavery. Not so much, you know. That was unusual. Absolutely.

So the last thing I want to ask you all is if you were to take this into your classrooms, what kinds of things might you want to do to enhance your ability to assess students and/or to develop this into something that would actually work for you. And I know this is really fast, but let’s just quick do some popcorn ideas about this. And the last piece is if you were to use this, is there anything that you feel like you would need to do to scaffold it differently? Yeah.

Teacher: I mean, I teach global, so we were thinking of ideas, possibly doing this with, like, the French Revolution and giving out different characters, or Caesar or any revolution for that matter, and really, you know, coming up with different types of characters and seeing what the kids do.

Sarah Jencks: It does require some research, though. Because as you noticed as I was going—it can be your research or the kids’, you can decide, sort of. You can use it as an assessment tool, or you can give it to them and then say you need to go find out more about these people.

Teacher: We had an Illinois regimental soldier, [unintelligible] Taylor, and we were trying to think what battles that soldier would have fought in. So that would be a springboard to do a little more research about that regiment, get background on—

Sarah Jencks: One thing that has occurred to me just while we’ve been doing this here is that you could potentially do this in part as a Google map activity. You could use Google maps to actually pin where each of the different people were from, and to upload, you know, something so that you’re creating a class project as a result that might allow you to—everybody can make use of it as a tool, ultimately.

Worklore: Brooklyn Workers Speak

Image
Photo, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel Construction Workers, 1947
Annotation

This site explores the work lives of Brooklynites (historic and present) as they made their living in the borough. The site has four main sections: Confronting Racial Bias documents discrimination in the workplace; Women Breaking Barriers examines the ways in which women's work roles changed over the decades; Seeking a Better Life takes a look at the issues facing new immigrants; and Changes in the Workplace discusses challenges such as unemployment and job displacement.

Each section contains an approximately 2,000-word article on its respective topic, photographs, and audio files of people speaking about their various vocations. The site also includes eight help wanted advertisements from the 1850s, 1860s, 1920s, and 1930s.

Visitors should not miss the interactive feature Can You Make Ends Meet?, where they can pick one of four vocations, and see if they can stretch their salary out to adequately include housing, transportation, and entertainment.

Telling Your Story allows visitors to share their own recollections of Brooklyn life. The site includes few primary sources, but the personal stories of Brooklyn workers may be useful to students, teachers, or researchers.

Newspapers and Periodicals
Oral History
Photographs
Brooklyn
New York City
Audio
Images
Text
Expansion & Reform, 1801-1861
Civil War & Reconstruction, 1850-1877
Devel. of the Industrial US, 1870-1900
Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930
Great Depression & WWII, 1929-1945
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
Contemporary US, 1968-Present
African Americans
Asian Americans
Cities & Suburbs
Gender
Immigration
Labor
Latinos
Reform
Women

Brown@50: Fulfilling the Promise

Image
Photo, School integration. Barnard School, Washington, D.C., May 27, 1955
Annotation

Created for the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, this website provides the legal history of the court case, and focuses attention on Howard University's contributions.

The website is divided into five main sections. Chronology presents a timeline of events and offers links to external resources. Brief History is a concise background of the Brown v. Board case and an overview of the case details and impact. Cases & Other Law provides a "legal road to Brown," with court decisions leading up to and following the Brown decision. Biographical Sketches introduces key figures. And Educational & Other Resources links to a wide variety of external websites and resources pertaining both to Brown v. Board of Education and to civil rights more generally.

Brown@50 will be especially useful to those researching the legal arguments of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.

Official Documents
Brown v. Board of Education
U.S. Supreme Court
Text
Devel. of the Industrial US, 1870-1900
Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930
Great Depression & WWII, 1929-1945
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
Contemporary US, 1968-Present
African Americans
Legal History

Classic African American Literature

Image
Logo, Multicultural Pavilion
Annotation

Provides links to 49 full-text versions of books, essays, articles, and poems about African-American life and culture, from the 18th century to the present day. Authors represented include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Chester W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey, Rita Dove, Booker T. Washington, Phillis Wheatley, and Maya Angelou. Many texts are from the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center.

Literary Sources
Text
Revolution & New Nation, 1754-1820s
Expansion & Reform, 1801-1861
Civil War & Reconstruction, 1850-1877
Devel. of the Industrial US, 1870-1900
Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
Contemporary US, 1968-Present
African Americans
Politics
Popular Culture, Leisure
Radicalism
Religion
Slavery
Women
Subscribe to African Americans