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In this picture a African American man is sold and taken away from his family. This is a event that happened frequently and was one of the many causes of the civil war.

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This image represents the ideals Abraham Lincoln was fighting for when going into the civil war, and during the civil war.

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This GIF represent the main ideals that people were fighting for and trying too achieve, which was freedom for African American individuals.

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In Abraham Lincolns speeches he mentioned the idea of freedom for the country and people various times and why they were going through all the pain with the idea of freedom in the end.

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The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln

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Named for John G. Nicolay, President Lincoln’s personal secretary, this is considered the “first draft” of the speech, begun in Washington on White house stationery. The second page is writen on different paper stock, indicating it was finished in Gettysburg before the cemetery dedication began. Lincoln gave this draft to Nicolay, who went to Gettysburg with Lincoln and witnessed the speech. The Library of Congress owns this manuscript.

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This image shows how the nation was split on what the American dream was. The South believed slavery should stay and the North believed everyone should obtain freedom.

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This image shows Lincoln providing goods for African Americans to achieve their American dream of freedom.

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This piece of writing was a massive eye opener for people in the north and not only enraged them but made them stand up for the freedom of slaves.

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This image shows the work slaves had to do without and decision or right to stop and go on with there day. This made the north upset and want freedom for all.

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This song was a thing soldiers sang in war to remind themselves what they were fighting for and why to keep on fighting as the idea was so important.

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This image represent the idea people were trying to spread during the civil war which was freedom for everyone.

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This article explains important authors during he civil war and what they wrote about, which caused some change or uprise.

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"The dream of humanity, the vaunted Union we thought so strong, so impregnable - lo! it seems already smash'd like a china plate. One bitter, bitter hour - perhaps proud America will never again know such an hour. She must pack and fly - no time to spare."

-Walt Whitman, Battle of Bull Run, July, 1861

Civil War Women

Civil War in Literature from EDSITEment-reviewed Documenting the American South provides a critical overview of writing during this period, including two personal diaries from Southern women who survived it. Mary Boykin Miller Chestnut's A Diary from Dixie creates a vivid portrait of a United States senator's wife moving within circles of the Confederate powerbrokers. Students can also relate to Sarah Morgan Dawson's A Confederate Girl's Diary, which describes war-torn Baton Rouge and New Orleans as the narrator pines for her carefree antebellum life.

Slave Narratives

EDSITEment's lessons and interactives devoted to slave narratives include essential Civil War readings and unlock a window on the 19 th century for today's student. [*See below]. Slave Narratives: Constructing U.S. History through Analyzing Primary Sources allows students to sample the individual experiences of former slaves. In From Courage to Freedom: Frederick Douglass's 1845 Autobiography students read the autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), which follows Douglass's courageous escape from his Maryland slaveholder and documents his journey from slave to free man. EDSITEment lesson Perspectives on the Slave Narrative considers The Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave (1847) from several perspectives: historical record, work of literature, political rhetoric, and autobiography, and asks students to grapple with the prejudices of readers then and now.

* Before reading these primary sources with students, it is important to discuss terms now considered derogatory and insulting used to describe African Americans. Full-class discussion should reveal the power of oral histories as well as the many factors that make up their limitations. EDSITEment has reviewed websites (below) that prepare students for this study and recommends consulting the Library of Congress's " A Note on the Language of the Narratives," for guidance on this topic.

Stephen Crane

The most riveting expression of fighting is found in The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, accessible online through EDSITEment-reviewed American Studies at the University of Virginia. In EDSITEment lesson The Red Badge of Courage: A New Kind of Courage, students discover Crane's masterful presentation of a Civil War battle through the eyes - and thoughts - of a single soldier. Companion EDSITEment lesson The Red Badge of Courage: A New Kind of Realism focuses on the altered point of view and stylistic innovations Crane used to create a heightened sense of realism and that sets the work apart from war stories written as tributes or propaganda. The essay Imaging the Civil War from EDSITEment-reviewed University of Virginia The Red Badge of Courage provides students with useful background information.

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce enlisted in the Union Army at the impressionable age of nineteen. The Civil War cast a long shadow over his life and work, shaping him into the writer he would become, and spawning his fascination with the supernatural. Bierce evolved into a Master of Macabre and though he became most widely known for his ghost stories, his war tales are considered by some critics to be the best writing on the Civil War. EDSITEment lesson Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and the Unreliable Narrator probes the genius in Bierce's Civil War's tale of terror, " An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" along with Poe's, " The Tell-Tale Heart." Students analyze the narrative voices within both as they learn warfare often involves more than guns and bullets and is played out in the mysteries of the human heart and mind as well as the battlefield.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Memorized by schoolchildren worldwide, Longfellow's famous poem " Paul Revere's Ride," available from the EDSITEment resource The Academy of American Poets, is often read as a poem about the start of the Revolutionary War. EDSITEment Lesson Why Do We Remember Revere? Paul Revere's Ride in History and Literature suggests there may be alternative ways to interpret this poem, published in 1861, when the country was on the brink of the Civil War. Students are asked to consider questions such as: was Longfellow calling up that earlier revolutionary symbol in an effort to renew national unity? If so, does this poem include references to the abolition of slavery? The EDSITEment-reviewed Antislavery Literature Project essay Longfellow and Whittier on Slavery discusses Longfellow's role within the abolitionist movement and his successful series, Poems on Slavery, published in 1842.

Walt Whitman

In his early writing, Walt Whitman sets out to explore ideas universal in scope. EDSITEment lesson Walt Whitman's Notebooks and Poetry: the Sweep of the Universe directs students to seek clues to this poet's effort to create a new and distinctly American form of verse. EDSITEment lesson Walt Whitman to Langston Hughes: Poems for a Democracy explores the historical context of Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" and examines daguerreotypes taken circa 1850. Both lessons illustrate how Whitman was determined to express truth through verse using authentic American situations and settings with language that appealed to the senses. The Civil War would provide him with ample opportunity.

Walt Whitman's notebooks available through the EDSITEment-reviewed American Memory project illustrate the Poet at Work and capture wrenching images that war evoked for him. The article, Daybreak Gray and Dim: How the Civil War Changed Walt Whitman's Poetry from NEH Humanities magazine, characterizes Whitman's first response to the call of war: "BEAT! beat! Drums! - blow! bugles! blow!" Haunting scenes of human suffering shape his maturing response to the war and find their way into this tender musing upon " A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," available at the NEH-funded Walt Whitman Archive, that will lead him to minister to soldiers through the end of the war.

Was Whitman describing himself when he declared his ideals in Democratic Vistas (available on the EDSITEment resource American Studies at the University of Virginia)? "In the future of these States must arise poets immenser far, and make great poems of death. The poems of life are great, but there must be the poems of the purports of life, not only in itself, but beyond itself." For Whitman had already written the nation's quintessential poem on life, death, and rebirth. When Lilacs Last in the dooryard Bloom'd articulates America's grief upon President Lincoln's untimely death in this lament of a stricken nation as it watches the train with Lincoln's body make its way across the country to its final resting place. A critical discussion of this elegy with its three archetypal symbols - the lilac, the star, and the hermit thrush - is found at the Whitman Archive.

Emily Dickinson

"War feels to me an Oblique place" wrote Emily Dickinson on the Civil War. Dickinson was removed from the fighting in her central Massachusetts haven known as the Homestead (now preserved as the Emily Dickinson Museum). Dickinson's poetry is a reverie on the universal human condition in all its suffering and joy; thus, refraining from remarking on the politics of the day and commenting on the war is understandable. Nevertheless, the war enters her correspondence with loved ones engaged in it, most notably her confident Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Students will enjoy delving into these Letters from Emily Dickinson: 'Will you be my preceptor?' in EDSITEment's three-lesson curriculum unit.

William Faulkner

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury serves as a Southern post-traumatic stress response to the loss of the Civil War and expresses his sense that the country never became fully reintegrated. Cultural values and family dynamics that survived the war in the South are evident in EDSITEment's The Sound and the Fury: Narrating the Compson Family Decline and the Changing South, a five-lesson curriculum unit in which students consider the novel as a reflection of an unjust social and economic class divide still extant in the 20 th century. This theme is further explored in Professor Dan Holtz course, "Literature Fights and Refights the Civil War," the product of an NEH Summer Seminar, and summarized on his website Faulkner as a Framework for Studying the Civil War.

EDSITEment-Reviewed Websites for Slave Narratives

EDSITEment Lessons on Civil War Literature

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Read and discuss some of the great American writers and their work in the mid-19th century. This feature explores the themes of slavery, the role of women, and the experience of war.

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This image depicts the idea that was roaming in the United States at the time which was the idea of freedom for all.

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This article explains the idea of the American dream during reconstruction which was competency and just getting better at what we were already doing.

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Reconsidering United States’ Reconstruction era, Gilded Age

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Stanford’s Richard White, an American historian, analyzes the United States’ history from 1865 to 1896 and provides a fresh perspective on the time period, which was marked by rising inequality and corruption.

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This video walks through the steps that people were taking in order to obtain freedom for all.

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Walk Through the War: 1862–The Struggle for Freedom

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This court case was a major event that opened peoples eyes to the problem of slavery and the idea that it might never get abolished.

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A case in which the Court decided that slaves who were descendants of American slaves were not citizens of the United States under Article III of the Constitution. The Court also used the decision to strike down the Missouri Compromise.

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This Gif shows how the United States wanted just to get better after the civil war and during reconstruction, and not try to achieve anything special. (Just be good overall)

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These are the generals that fought during the civil war and were the ones that helped the north win, and our country produce to reconstruction.

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This lecture shows how the American people dreamed of change in their country and the want to make things around them better before doing it anywhere else.

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Dreams of War and Peace: How Americans Experienced the Civil War in their Sleep | Virginia Museum of History & Culture

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On April 27, 2017, Jonathan W. White delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Dreams of War and Peace: How Americans Experienced the Civil War in their Sleep.” The Civil War placed new and unique strains on nineteenth-century Americans, and their nightly visions reflected those hardships. Sometimes the war intruded on people’s slumber, vividly bringing to life the horrors of the conflict. For others, nighttime was an escape from the hard realities of life and death in wartime. In this talk, Jonathan W.

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This article explains how the idea of keeping the united states together quickly changed into the battle of freedom during the civil war.

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African-Americans fleeing slavery in Maryland
Lirbray of Congress

Keeping the so-called "Border States" in Union control was of paramount importance. Maryland was one of these states, a slave state still in the Union. There were many southern sympathizers in the state, but the majority were loyal Unionists. Still, any hint of rebellion was quickly addressed by Lincoln's administration and the military. The issue of emancipation could ignite dangerous reactions from the people of Maryland. Lincoln proceeded cautiously and stayed informed about what Marylanders were thinking.

The people of Frederick remained divided in their loyalties before and after the Maryland Campaign. On December 28th, Maj. Peter Vredenburgh, of the 14th New Jersey stationed at Monocacy Junction, reflected local sentiment and reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation, when he wrote, "it will ruin us. Men here who were good Union sympathizers before are now on the other side."

The Frederick Examiner noted on October 1st that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would have no effect on Maryland as it did not apply to enslaved people in the state. However, it asserted that even if the proclamation were to apply, "the value and utility of slavery in Maryland has already been destroyed by the war; the domestic institution can receive no further detriment here." The editors proposed emancipation with some form of compensation for the loyal Maryland slave-owners. By the summer of 1862 slave advertisements in the Examiner had practically disappeared; replaced with advertisements such as the following: "Wanted to Hire, a middle age slave woman from the country, by the month or year, to cook, wash and iron for a small family. A comfortable home and good wages."

African Americans in Maryland, slave and free, were caught in the middle. Earning freedom by escaping slavery or avoiding Confederate patrols was important, but keeping freedom with Union victory and abolition was the real prize.

Photograph of John Brown
Library of Congress

Just yards from the fire engine house where John Brown, a zealous abolitionist, made his final stand against slavery in 1859, a Union officer took his own stand defending a group of African American men.

Between September 13th and 15th, 1862, as part of Lee's Maryland Campaign, Confederate troops under Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson surrounded and captured the 12,500 man Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In addition to the captured artillery, wagons, mules, small arms, and thousands of pounds of food, Confederates were rounding up hundreds of Contrabands or runaway slaves who had sought refuge behind Union lines. Col. William Trimble of the 60th Ohio Volunteer Infantry was concerned. He had a number of free African Americans who had been working as servants and teamsters for his regiment since they enlisted in Ohio. These men were free and Trimble was determined they would stay free. Trimble received passes for his free workers from Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill, allowing them to stay with the regiment.

On the morning of September 16th, the 60th Ohio, now paroled prisoners, prepared to march across the Potomac River pontoon bridge into Maryland. The regiment was halted by a Confederate guard with crossed bayonets. The Confederate officer in charge refused to accept the passes for the freedmen and the rebels began "dragging the colored boys from their positions near the officers." Trimble reached into his holster and drew his revolver. "My men are unarmed--I am not!" he shouted. "I'll sell my life for these free boys. Unhand them! Guards, give way! Regiment, march!" The Confederates stepped aside, and the African Americans marched across the pontoon with the 60th Ohio.

A proclamation of emancipation would not be issued for another six days, but for Col. Trimble and the men of the 60th Ohio, the war was already about freedom.

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Keeping It Together (U.S. National Park Service)

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Keeping the so-called "Border States" in Union control was of paramount importance. Maryland was one of these states, a slave state still in the Union. There were many southern sympathizers in the state, but the majority were loyal Unionists. Still, any hint of rebellion was quickly addressed by Lincoln's administration and the military.

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This video depicts events that took place per-civil war and shows how they built off of each other to create war in the united states.