A Debate Against Slavery

Lesson Three of Curriculum Unit:
Before Brother Fought Brother: Life in the North and South—1847-1861

Introduction:

Background for the teacher:

Sometimes, people will fight to keep someone else from being treated poorly. Disagreement over slavery was central to the conflict between the North and the South. The nation was deeply divided.

Note: Slavery was a cruel system. To study slavery means to encounter facts and/or images some students may find unsettling—including the fact that many people in the South vigorously defended it. Sensitivity to these issues is recommended throughout this lesson.

The lesson:
Prior to the Civil War, ours was a nation half-slave and half-free. Show your students a map such as Reynolds Political Map of the United States, designed to exhibit the comparative area of the free and slave states, New York and Chicago, 1856.

As students who read the Lewiston Mill Rules in Lesson 1 will recognize, conditions for workers in the North were often less than optimal. Pay was low, hours were long, workplaces were dangerous and much was expected of the workers, who were at the same time looked down upon by almost anyone in a superior position. Such conditions served as fodder for people who apologized for or even supported slavery in their arguments against abolition, which were ultimately arguments that defended racism.

Student Activity:

In this lesson, students will argue against slavery using evidence they gather from archival documents. To help students develop their argument against slavery, select representative documents from the following resources to share with students. (Note: Asterisks denote items of special interest.) You may wish to have students work in groups and use the document analysis worksheets available through the EDSITEment resource The Digital Classroom to review these documents. If desired, students can also use the worksheet 19th Century Arguments For and Against Slavery, available in pdf format, or they can use the interactive version. After students have analyzed the documents, ask them to describe each document and to tell what is revealed about African Americans' quality of life through the document.

Assessment:

To culminate this unit, ask students to demonstrate their knowledge of the institution of slavery, as well as what they learned about conditions for free workers in the North in the years before the Civil War. Have the students share specific information gleaned from the table of resources above that they find especially interesting or fascinating.

Extending the Lesson:

• Not all African Americans were enslaved in the years before the Civil War. Show your students a map such as Free Persons of Color (available through a link from the EDSITEment resource Valley of the Shadow) to illustrate that free blacks lived throughout our nation, most notably in the South.



• Uncle Tom's Cabin created a sensation. Lincoln himself called the author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "the little lady who made this big war." Her fiction managed to dramatize the realities of slavery for many Northerners in a way nothing else had. Read all about it in Uncle Tom's Cabin Appeared in Serial Form, June 5, 1851.

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• Africans in America [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia]
  • Letters to R. C. Ballard Regarding Slave Woman Abuse
    [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3436t.html]
  • Anthony Burns (a slave) Speaks
    [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2916t.html]
• American Memory [http://memory.loc.gov/]
  • Reynolds Political Map of the United States
    [http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/african/reynomap.jpg]
  • Lewiston Mill Rules
    [http://www.si.edu/lemelson/centerpieces/whole_cloth/u2ei/u2images/
    act9/Lew_rules.html]
  • Martin Robison Delany
    [http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/page.cfm?ID=5548]
  • An African-American Newspaper
    [http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/archive/02/0210001r.jpg]
  • Robert James Harlan
    [http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/page.cfm?ID=5552]
  • Harriet Tubman escapes slavery
    [http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/aa/tubman]
  • Union with freemen --No union with slaveholders
    [http://memory.loc.gov/rbc/rbpe/rbpe13/rbpe137/13700400/001dr.jpg]
  • Photograph of the barn on the Seth Marshall homestead in
    Painesville, Lake County, Ohio
    [http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/page.cfm?ID=5589]
  • Photograph of the Ripley, Ohio Wesleyan (African) Church
    [http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/page.cfm?ID=4601]
  • The Snowden Family of Clinton, Knox County, Ohio
    [http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/page.cfm?ID=4640]
  • Certificate of Permission to Reside in Petersburg, Virginia
    [http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/archive/02/0202001r.jpg]
  • Proceedings of the Colored National Convention Held in Rochester
    [http://memory.loc.gov/rbc/rbcmisc/ody/ody0217/0217003v.jpg]
  • Wanted Poster for Emily -- Runaway Slave
    [http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/page.cfm?ID=4418]
  • Certificate of Proof of Citizenship for a Free Black Man
    Serving as a Seaman
    [http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/archive/02/0206001r.jpg]
  • The Child's Anti-Slavery Book
    [http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=ody_rbcmisc&fileName=ody/
    ody0313/ody0313page.db&recNum=8]
  • Largest Slave Auction
    [http://www.americaslibrary.gov/pages/jb_0303_slaveauc_1.html]
  • Illustration of a Slave Auction
    [http://www.americaslibrary.gov/pages/jb_0303_slaveauc_1_e.html]
  • Alfred Francis Russell, three-quarter length portrait
    [http://memory.loc.gov/pnp/dag/3d/3d01000/3d01932v.jpg]
  • Slave Trade
    [http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/archive/01/0120001r.jpg]
  • Uncle Tom's Cabin Appeared in Serial Form, June 5, 1851
    [http://www.americaslibrary.gov/pages/jb_0605_beecher_1.html]
• Digital Classroom [http://www.nara.gov/education/classrm.html]
  • Document Analysis Worksheet
    [http://www.nara.gov/education/teaching/analysis/write.html]
• Documents of African-American Women
  [http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html]
  • Slave Letter: Vilet Lester letter to Miss Patsey Patterson
    [http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/lester/lester-p1-72.gif]
  • Harriet, the Moses of Her People
    [http://docsouth.unc.edu/harriet/menu.html]
• Valley of the Shadow [http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/]
  • Free Persons of Color
    [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/census/frcolor1.jpg]