Subject Areas |
History and Social Studies
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U.S. History - African-American |
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U.S. History - Civil Rights |
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U.S. History - Civil War and Reconstruction |
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World History - Human Rights |
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Time Required |
| Each part of the lesson plan requires one to two class periods
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Skills |
| historical comprehension
historical interpretation
historical research
information gathering
working with primary documents
essay writing
Internet skills
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Additional Data |
| Date Created: 05/21/02 |
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Date Posted |
| 4/9/2002 |
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Families in Bondage
Introduction
This two-part lesson plan draws on letters
written by African Americans in slavery and by free blacks to
loved ones still in bondage, singling out a few among the many
slave experiences to offer students a glimpse into slavery and
its effects on African American family life. In Part I, students
examine the letters of Hannah Valentine, an enslaved woman who
lived on a Virginia plantation, drawing information from them
to diagram her own family circle and the network of relationships
to white society that defined her world. They next compare Valentine's
letters to her daughter and husband with a letter to her master's
wife, noting differences in tone and substance to draw conclusions
about the emotional bonds within her family and the more problematic
bonds that made her part of her master's family as well. Finally,
students write a short analysis describing Valentine's complex
family life. In Part II of the lesson plan, students read letters
from a fugitive slave to his still-enslaved wife and from a
black Union soldier to his still-enslaved daughters, confronting
directly the anguish of separation that was a constant factor
in African American family life during slave times, when children
and parents, husbands and wives, were routinely sold away from
one another. Through these letters, students explore some of
the ways African Americans sought to overcome this anguish,
and using these letters as a lens, they re-examine Hannah Valentine's
letters to discover a similar anguish in her seemingly secure
family life. Finally, students explore the emotional terrain
revealed in these letters by comparing the response to separation
voiced by Valentine with that voiced by the Union soldier and
the fugitive slave.
Learning Objectives
(1) To gain insight into the experience
of African Americans during slave times; (2) To explore the
effects of slavery on African American family life; (3) To
examine some ways that African Americans in slavery sought
to cope with their condition; (4) To gain experience in working
with personal correspondence as a primary resource for historical
study.
NOTE: Some
students may react emotionally to letters describing the experience
of African Americans in slavery. Educators should preview
the letters presented in this lesson plan to determine whether
the material is appropriate for class discussion.
Introduce this lesson by asking students
what they already know about slavery in the United States.
Note their responses on the chalkboard to create a summary
of their views on the subject. Lead a discussion to help students
distinguish their opinions about slavery from their knowledge
about it. Help them also distinguish their knowledge about
the institution of slavery from their knowledge about the
experience of living in slavery. Ask: How do these two perspectives
differ? What can we learn about slavery from those who lived
as slaves? What might their voices add to our understanding
of African American history?
PART I
1
Distribute copies of the three letters written by Hannah Valentine
available through EDSITEment at the Documents
of African-American Women website. (At the website homepage,
click on "Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson: Slave Letters."
Click on "About
Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson" for background on
these women, then click on "Read items from the collection"
and select each of the three letters by Hannah Valentine to
Eliza,
her daughter; to Michael
Valentine, her husband; and to Mary
Campbell, her master's wife to obtain transcripts. You
can also retrieve images of the handwritten letters themselves
by following the links that accompany each transcript.) Explain
to students that Hannah Valentine was a house slave at the
Montcalm plantation in Abingdon, Virginia, and that she wrote
these letters in 1837 and 1838, when her master, David Campbell,
served as governor and had moved his family and several of
his slaves, including Hannah's daughter and husband, to the
state capital in Richmond.
2
Share with students the present-day
photographs of Montcalm available at the Documents of African
American Women website. (Select the "Photographs
of Montcalm and slave house" link on the "Hannah Valentine
and Lethe Jackson: Slave Letters" webpage.) Discuss briefly
how these images compare with students' preconceptions about
a Southern plantation. Have students locate Abingdon and Richmond
using a map of Virginia (available through EDSITEment at the
National
Geographic Society Xpeditions website: at the homepage,
click on "Atlas," then click "U.S." in the navigation bar
at the top of the frame and select "Virginia" in the scrolling
menu at the left.) Discuss briefly how Abingdon's isolated
location in the extreme southwestern corner of the state,
amid the Appalachian Mountains, may have influenced life there.
3 Divide
the class into study groups and have each group use the Valentine
letters to create a web diagram of the relationships among
all the people mentioned in them. Who are the slaves and who
are the masters? How can we tell? Who are the members of Hannah's
immediate family? Who are her more distant relatives and friends?
(To assist in these identifications, provide students with
the partial list of Hannah Valentine's children from the "About
Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson" page at the Documents
of African-American Women website.) Who are the members
of her master's family? Who are their relatives, friends,
and employees? As they develop their web diagrams, encourage
students to consider where Hannah herself fits into this network
of social relationships. To what degree is she a subordinate
figure? To what degree is she of central importance in the
Montcalm social circle? Have each group share its diagram
with the class and its opinion about the role of specific
individuals, such as the overseer Mr. Lathum and the preacher
Winton Late. What picture of plantation society emerges from
these letters? To what extent are Hannah and her family part
of this society? To what extent are they part of a separate
African American society?
4
Inform students that slaves were for
the most part not permitted to learn how to read or write.
Have them point out indications in Hannah Valentine's letters
that she wrote them by dictation to a white person and that
they were read aloud by a white person to her husband and
daughter. Explore the implications of this enforced illiteracy
for the relationship between slave and master by having students
role-play the situation in their study groups, letting one
student read each letter aloud to the group. Where does the
tone or subject matter of the letter suggest that Hannah Valentine
is speaking indirectly to her master's family through what
is supposed to be a private letter to a member of her own
family? What messages does she convey in this way? Where does
she seek to influence her masters' attitude toward herself
and the members of her family by this indirect method? Where
does she attempt to influence their behavior? What aspects
of these two letters, by contrast, seem directed solely to
her daughter or husband? What is her message to them? What
concerns of theirs does she address? What concerns do students
imagine Hannah leaves unmentioned, knowing that her words
are being overheard by her master?
5
Students will notice that Hannah sent
messages to other members of her family through her daughter
and husband. Have students consider whether this is a simple
courtesy or an effort to maintain the bonds of kinship among
members of a family dispersed among many masters. Compare
this sharing of affections with the sharing of news that characterizes
Hannah's letter to Mary Campbell. What are the bonds that
she seeks to strengthen by informing her master's wife in
detail of recent events on the plantation and in the neighborhood?
What role does Hannah seem to play in the Campbell's family
life? Is she part of their family as well? Have students discuss
in their groups and share as a class how they think Mary Campbell
regarded the enslaved woman Hannah Valentine. How might she
have described Hannah? What might have been her feelings toward
Hannah? Have students support their inferences with reference
to Hannah Valentine's letters. To what extent can Hannah be
said to have made a place for herself in the Campbell family
and thereby gained a measure of "freedom" despite her enslavement?
6
Conclude this part of the lesson by
having students write an essay describing what family life
was like for African Americans and whites at the Montcalm
plantation. What would family life at Montcalm look like through
the eyes of Hannah's daughter, Eliza, for example? How did
it appear to Miss Virginia Campbell, the master's daughter?
Have students read their essays aloud to compare the understandings
they have drawn from Hannah Valentine's letters.
PART II
1
To deepen students' insight into the experience of slavery,
focus next on several letters written by African American
men who gained freedom for themselves but left loved ones
behind them in bondage. Two such letters are accessible through
EDSITEment at the Freedmen
and Southern Society Project. To retrieve the John Boston
letter, click on "Maryland
Fugitive Slave to His Wife." To retrieve the Spotswood
Rice letters, click on "Missouri
Black Soldier to His Enslaved Daughters." Both documents
are also accessible through the "Desruction of Slavery" link
and "The Black Military Experience" link on the website's
homepage.
2
Introduce these letters by having students
consider their historical context. Draw a timeline on the
chalkboard and mark January 1862, the date of Boston's letter,
and September 1864, the date of Rice's letters.
- Through class discussion, have students locate important
events on this timeline, such as the outbreak of the Civil
War at Fort Sumter (April 1861), the Confederate victories
at Bull Run (July 1861 and August 1862), the signing of
the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1863), the Union
victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg (July 1863), the Union
assault on Atlanta (November 1864), and the Confederate
surrender at Appomattox (April 1865). Ask what impact this
course of events may have had on Boston and Rice as they
wrote their letters.
- Next focus specifically on developments
that affected the institution of slavery during this period,
referring to the "Chronology
of Emancipation during the Civil War" available at the
Freedmen
and Southern Society Project website. (On the website's
homepage, click on "Chronology
of Emancipation.") Note, for example, that it was not
until March 1862 that Congress assured fugitive slaves a
safe haven among Union troops, and not until March 1865
that Congress liberated the still-enslaved wives and children
of black Union soldiers. Help students recognize that Boston
and Rice were both acting in advance of such official developments,
taking risks in a historical situation that may seem clear
and certain from our perspective but that was uncertain
from their point of view.
- To emphasize this point, have students consider how the
Emancipation Proclamation affected the status of Boston
and Rice and their families. Remind students that the Emancipation
Proclamation applied only to slaves in the Confederate states,
not in border states like Missouri and Maryland. How might
Boston and Rice have interpreted this executive act? Did
it necessarily promise freedom to their loved ones, or did
it imply that they might remain enslaved after the war?
3
Have
students read and discuss the letters written by John Boston
and Spotswood Rice. These letters speak powerfully of the
anguish of separation experienced by African Americans throughout
the period when their families were routinely torn apart by
the slave trade. You should anticipate
that some students may react emotionally to these letters
and should determine whether it is better to guide the discussion
yourself or to have students share their feelings and insights
directly with one another in study groups.
4
Have students consider first the part
that religious faith plays in helping these families cope
with separation. Both Boston and Rice foresee a day when they
will be reunited with their loved ones by divine authority.
How does the reunion that John Boston envisions differ from
that foreseen by Spotswood Rice? How might the course of events
during the Civil War have contributed to this difference?
To what degree is Rice's faith in God reinforced by his faith
in the United States government and its military power? Have
students similarly contrast the moral views Boston and Rice
express toward their loved ones' masters, Prescia Owen ("Tell
Mrs. Owen that I trust she will continue her kindness to you
and that God will bless her") and Kitty Diggs ("As for her
Christianity, I expect the devil has such in hell").
5
Call students' attention to the fact
that Spotswood Rice evidently wrote at least part of his letters
himself. How would the assumption that he and his daughters
could read and write help explain the differences in tone
and attitude between his letters and that of the presumably
illiterate John Boston? With this in mind, have students look
back at the letters of Hannah Valentine for evidence that
she too felt the anguish of separation so vividly expressed
by Boston and Rice. Call attention to her repeated reassurances
that her daughter Eliza's children "seem to be very well satisfied
without her." Note also the reassuring manner with which she
tells her son Richard that she has lost contact with his wife,
who seems to have been sold or sent away from Montcalm to
a plantation in Mississippi. Have students compare Valentine's
handling of these painful circumstances -- a mother forced
to leave her children, a husband deprived of his wife -- with
the similarly consoling way in which John Boston seeks to
soften the pain of separation for his wife. Against this background
of controlled and suppressed emotion, what is the force of
Valentine's statement (in her letter to her husband Michael),
"I begin to feel so anxious to hear from you"? What fuels
her anxiety aside from feeling lonesome? And how does this
anxiety add urgency to the messages of affection she sends
through her letters to all the absent members of her family?
6
Have students consider finally the
relationships implied by Boston's letter to his wife and Rice's
letter to his daughters. How do they address their loved ones'
feelings of abandonment? What message about themselves do
they send? How do they ask to be perceived? What continuing
role do they claim for themselves in their loved ones' lives?
What are the bonds that still connect them? Students might
find their way to this intimate and interpersonal level of
communication through dramatic readings of the letters. Have
several members of the class (or several students in each
study group) speak for Boston and Rice in this way. What emotions
are called up as they read? Guilt? Sadness? Resolution? Fear?
Love? What emotions are stirred up in the student audience?
Would they feel consoled and content, as the writers hope,
if they were the women who received these letters? Have students
analyze the impact of these letters by writing an essay comparing
the response to separation voiced by Boston and Rice with
that voiced by Hannah Valentine.
Extending the Lesson
- For further insight into the experience
of slavery and into African American family life during
slave times, have students examine a letter written in 1857
by a slave woman named Vilet Lester, accessible through
EDSITEment at the Documents
of African-American Women. For a more fully developed
firsthand portrayal of slave life, have students read Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Ann Jacobs,
available through EDSITEment at the Documenting
the American South.
- Finally, to broaden students' perspective,
have them visit the "African
American Odyssey" exhibit at the American
Memory Project website, accessible through EDSITEment.
(At the American
Memory homepage, click on "Browse" for a list of online
resources, then select "African
American Odyssey.") This rich collection of images documents
black America's quest for equality from the late 18th century
down to the Civil Rights Era, with extensive material on
slavery and the tradition of resistance to enslavement through
strategies ranging from open rebellion to the pursuit of
spiritual freedom in religious faith.
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