Teacher Name: Aaron Schneider
Subject Area: United States History
School: George C Marshall HS
Grade/level: 11th grade
Adventure of the American Mind Northern Virginia
FCPS – Virginia and U. S. History
Lesson Plan
Era
Era 3: Sectionalism and Pre-Civil War Events
Topic
Events leading to the Civil War
Lesson Title
From Secession to Civil War
Instructional Time
Essential Learning
What is the concept to
be learned? What is the
big picture?
2 classes (max) Block schedule (90 minute classes)
As a result of this lesson, students will know:
1. How cultural, economical, and constitutional issues created
bitter divisions between the North and the South?
2. How did the issues of states’ rights and slavery increase
sectional tension between the North and South?
3. Which four slave state governments stayed loyal to the
Union? Which states seceded from the Union? Where were
the other states that remained in the Union located?
SBI Objectives
POS/SOL by number and
descriptor.
STANDARD USI.9a, 9b, 9c, 9d.
The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes, major events,
and effects of the Civil War by
a) describing the cultural, economic, and constitutional issues that
divided the nation.
The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes, major events,
and effects of the Civil War by
b) explaining how the issues of states’ rights and slavery increased
sectional tensions.
The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes, major events,
and effects of the Civil War by
c) identifying on a map the states that seceded from the Union and
those that remained in the Union.
The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes, major events,
and effects of the Civil War by
1
d) describing the roles of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses
S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and
Frederick Douglass in events leading to and during the war.
Assessment
How will you know that
the lesson was
successful? Describe
what type of student
assessments you will use
to evaluate
understanding. Attach a
copy of student
instructions or
assessment instrument.
Class discussion based on student reading assignments
(textbook or other).
Quiz/Tests on material covering the entire era (multiple
choice questions which correlate to the POS/ SOL.
Essay in which students must identify causes for secession
(five paragraph essay). Rubric will be provided so students
will know expectations of the essay.
Procedure
Teacher will ask students to identify political and nonpolitical leaders (partial review) that still play a prominent
role in shaping America through the 1840’s and 1850’s
including:
Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C Calhoun
Stephen Douglas, William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham
Lincoln,
Dred Scott, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore,
James Buchanan, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown,
Jefferson Davis
Describe step by step
procedure. Include
opener, teacher
presentation and student
activities.
The teacher will also discuss new political leaders after
Martin Van Buren and how they shaped the presidency
and dealt with abolition.
Students will be responsible for discussion of material
(homework) through the use of the Library of Congress
site. Examples include;
-copy of the Liberator by William Lloyd Garrison.
(www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam007.html)
-copies of notes by leaders for and against the Compromise of 1850
(students will be guided to location within LOC to use primary documents)
2
The teacher will then use the Power Point as a guide
through the lecture/class discussion as the class highlights
events that ultimately lead to secession and the Civil War.
Materials/Resources US/VA Textbook
Power Point presentation
Student access to the internet including access the Library
of Congress website.
Handouts/Assignments
Multiple Choice Test/ Essay on causes of the Civil War
(including a rubric which leads students through the
requirements of each paragraph).
Differentiation
Include strategies for reteaching and special
populations such as GT,
ESOL and special
education.
A copy of the Power Point will be provided for special
needs students. Other accommodations will also be made
based on a student’s IEP or 504 Plan (Teacher filling in
scan-tron sheet for the MC test).
3
From Secession to Civil War
http://lincolnstore.com/page5.html
STANDARD USI.9a
The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes,
major events, and effects of the Civil War by
a) describing the cultural, economic, and constitutional
issues that divided the nation.
Essential Understandings
Essential Questions
Essential Knowledge
Essential Skills
Cultural, economic, and
constitutional
differences between the
North and the South
eventually resulted in
the Civil War.
How did cultural,
economical, and
constitutional issues
create bitter divisions
between the North and
the South?
Issues that divided the nation
Slavery
•While there were several differences
between the North and the South, the
issues related to slavery increasingly
divided the nation and led to the Civil
War.
Cultural
•The North was mainly an urban
society in which people held jobs.
•The South was primarily an
agricultural society in which people
lived in small villages and on farms
and plantations.
•Because of their cultural differences,
people of the North and South found it
difficult to agree on social and political
issues.
Economic
•The North was a manufacturing
region, and its people favored tariffs
that protected factory owners and
workers from foreign competition.
Make connections
between the past and
the present. (USI.1b)
Sequence events in
United States history.
(USI.1c)
Interpret ideas and
events from different
historical perspectives.
(USI.1d)
http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/cotton_gin_patent/cotton_gin_patent.html
http://blackhistory.harpweek.com/7Illustrations/Slavery/SlaveAuctionInTheSouthBI.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1561.html
Map of the
United States
Free / Slave Soil Map - 1820
The Missouri Compromise
http://www.rosecity.net/civilwar/capesites/warmap.html
STANDARD USI.9a
(continued)
The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes, major events,
and effects of the Civil War by
a) describing the cultural, economic, and constitutional issues that
divided the nation.
Essential Understandings
Essential Questions
Essential Knowledge
•Southerners opposed
tariffs that would cause
prices of manufactured
goods to increase.
Planters were also
concerned that England
might stop buying
cotton from the South if
tariffs were added.
•Constitutional
•A major conflict was
states’ rights versus
strong central
government.
Essential Skills
STANDARD USI.9b
The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes, major events,
and effects of the Civil War by
b) explaining how the issues of states’ rights and slavery increased
sectional tensions.
Essential Understandings
Essential Questions
Essential Knowledge
Essential Skills
The South feared that the
North would take control of
Congress, and Southerners
began to proclaim states’
rights as a means of selfprotection.
The North believed that the
nation was a union and
could not be divided. While
the Civil War did not begin
as a war to abolish slavery,
issues surrounding slavery
deeply divided the nation.
How did the issues of
states’ rights and
slavery increase
sectional tension
between the North and
South?
Issues that divided the nation
•An important issue separating
the country related to the power
of the Federal government.
Southerners believed that they
had the power to declare any
national law illegal. Northerners
believed that the national
government’s power was
supreme over that of the states.
•Southerners felt that the
abolition of slavery would
destroy their region’s economy.
Northerners believed that
slavery should be abolished for
moral reasons.
Compromises attempting to
resolve differences
•Missouri Compromise (1820):
Missouri was a slave state;
Maine, a free state.
•Compromise of l850:
California was a free state.
Southwest territories would
decide about slavery.
•Kansas-Nebraska Act: People
decided the slavery issue
(“popular sovereignty”).
Sequence events in United
States history. (USI.1c)
Interpret ideas and events
from different historical
perspectives. (USI.1d)
Interpret patriotic slogans.
(USI.1h)
Clay's compromise
resolutions was the
territorial accessions to
the United States
resulting from the war
with Mexico, thereby
thrusting the question
of the expansion of
slavery dramatically to
the forefront once
again.
http://www.christianlaw.org/juniorpartners/ResourceCenter/am_hero_clay.html
http://www.state.nh.us/nhdhr/legport2/webster.html
Daniel Webster (1782-1852), United
States senator from Massachusetts,
rose on 7 March 1850 to support a
complex series of statutes introduced
by Henry Clay (1777-1852) of
Kentucky that came to be known as
"The Compromise of 1850." This
"Seventh of March" speech, which
Webster preferred to call his
"Constitution and the Union" speech,
contained the famous opening lines,
"I wish to speak to-day, not as a
Massachusetts man, nor as a
Northern man, but as an American,
and a member of the Senate of the
United States." These lines are
reflected in Webster's notes for the
exordium (or beginning) of his
speech.
Senator John C. Calhoun’s
letter to Congress asking his
fellow members to vote
against the Compromise of
1850 just three weeks before
his death.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/CalhounClayCompromise.html
This satirical print by
Currier& Ives comments
on President Zachary
Taylor's attempts to
balance southern and
northern interests on the
question of slavery in
1850. Various members of
Congress fill the evenly
balanced scales including
the Compromise of 1850
opponents Senator Henry
Clay, left, and Senator
John C. Calhoun, right.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm151.html
On June 5, 1851, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
began to appear in serial form in the Washington National Era, an
abolitionist weekly. Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery story
was published in forty installments over the next ten months. For
her story Mrs. Stowe was paid $300.
Although the weekly had a limited circulation, its audience
increased as reader after reader passed their copy along to
another. In March 1852, a Boston publisher decided to issue
Uncle Tom's Cabin as a book and it became an instant best
seller. Three hundred thousand copies were sold the first year,
and about 2,000,000 copies were sold worldwide by 1857. For
one three month period Stowe reportedly received $10,000 in
royalties. Across the nation people discussed the novel and hotly
debated the most pressing socio-political issue dramatized in its
narrative, slavery.
Because Uncle Tom's Cabin so polarized the abolitionist and antiabolitionist debate, some claim it to be one of the causes of the
Civil War. Indeed, when President Lincoln received its author,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, at the White House in 1862, legend has it
he exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who made this big war?"
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/jun05.html
http://nationalhistoryday.org/03_educators/
2000/uncletom.htm
Results of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854
http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112391/kansas-nebraska_act.htm
Dred Scott v. Sanford, 19 How. 393, was decided by the United States
Supreme Court on 6 March 1857. Scott (1809-1858), a slave, had been
taken many years before from Missouri, a slave state, to the free state of
Illinois and to Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was forbidden by the
Missouri Compromise of 1820. After returning to Missouri, he sued for his
freedom on the grounds that his residence in a free state and in free
territory had released him from bondage. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney
(1777-1864), delivering the opinion of the Court, held that a slave's status
was fixed by the laws of the state in which he lived. Scott, as a slave,
could not be a citizen and could not sue in the federal courts.
Furthermore, since slaves were only property, they could not be
regulated by Congress and excluded from any territory. The Missouri
Compromise, which had already been repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska
Act of 1854, was "not warranted by the Constitution, and [was] therefore
void." Scott had not been made free by being carried into territory north of
the compromise line. This decision greatly inflamed the sectional
controversy and was denounced by antislavery elements everywhere.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mcc:@sum(@field(OTHER+@band(Scott,+Dred++1809+1858)))+@field(SUBJ+@band(Scott,+Dred++1809+1858))))
http://www.illinoiscivilwar.org/debates.html
The debates between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln were held during the 1858
campaign for a US Senate seat from Illinois. The debates were held at 7 sites throughout
Illinois, one in each of the 7 Congressional Districts [ Map of Congresstional Districts].
Douglas, a Democrat, was the incumbent Senator, having been elected in 1847. He had
chaired the Senate Committee on Territories. He helped enact the Compromise of 1850.
Douglas then was a proponent of Popular Sovereignty, and was responsible for the KansasNebraska Act of 1854. The legislation led to the violence in Kansas, hence the name
"Bleeding Kansas"
Lincoln was a relative unknown at the beginning of the debates. In contrast to Douglas'
Popular Sovereignty stance, Lincoln stated that the US could not survive as half-slave and
half-free states. The Lincoln-Douglas debates drew the attention of the entire nation.
John Brown (1800-1859) was an abolitionist who took direct action to free slaves by
force. Following his raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in mid-October 1859, he was
convicted of treason, conspiracy, and murder. One of the most controversial
abolitionists, Brown was regarded by some as a martyr and by others as a common
assassin. Brown's dignified bearing in prison and at his trial moved many spectators.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Brown's death would "make the gallows as glorious
as the cross." This image shows a heroic Brown being adored by a slave mother and
child as he walks to his execution on December 2, 1859.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/images/brown.jpg
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/jbrown/battle2.gif
http://www.multied.com/elections/1860State.html
Road to Secession and Civil War
Go to the links and answer the following questions:
1. Look at the illustrations and describe the behavior of the slaveholders and southerners.
Is this effective propaganda? Explain.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=rbpe&fileName=rbpe24/rbpe248/24800100/rbpe24800100.db&recNu
m=0&itemLink=r?ammem/rbpebib:@field(NUMBER+@band(rbpe+24800100))&linkTe
xt=0
2. Read the excerpt of John Brown addressing the Virginia Court after he is deemed
guilty for his behavior at Harper’s Ferry. Look at the picture and then click on the text to
see what he said. Explain how he could be right or wrong (southern and northern
response).
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=rbpe&fileName=rbpe06/rbpe065/06500500/rbpe06500500.db&recNu
m=0&itemLink=r?ammem/rbpebib:@field(NUMBER+@band(rbpe+06500500))&linkTe
xt=0
3. If you lived in Missouri in the mid-1840’s what would your response be to this sign? Is
the large sum of money enough to sway you in a different direction? Are there any
problems with this sign?
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/rbc/rbpe/rbpe08/rbpe086/08600200/001dr.jpg
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a12359
LC-USZ62-9916 (b&w film copy neg.)
SUMMARY: A satire on enforcement of the "gag-rule" in the House of
Representatives, prohibiting discussion of the question of slavery. Growing antislavery
sentiment in the North coincided with increased resentment by southern congressmen of
such discussion as meddlesome and insulting to their constituencies. The print may relate
to John Quincy Adams's opposition to passage of the resolution in 1838, or (more likely)
to his continued frustration in attempting to force the slavery issue through presentation
of northern constituents' petitions in 1839. In December 1839 a new "gag rule" was
passed by the House forbidding debate, reading, printing of, or even reference to any
petition on the subject of abolition. Here Adams cowers prostrate on a pile composed of
petitions, a copy of the abolitionist newspaper the "Emancipator," and a resolution to
recognize Haiti. He says "I cannot stand Thomson's [sic] frown." South Carolina
representative Waddy Thompson, Jr., a Whig defender of slavery, glowers at him from
behind a sack and two casks, saying "Sir the South loses caste whenever she suffers this
subject to be discussed here; it must be indignantly frowned down." Two blacks crouch
behind Thompson, one saying "de dem Bobolishn is down flat!" Weitenkampf cites an
impression with an imprint naming Robinson as printer and publisher, this line being
apparently trimmed from the Library's impression. The drawing style and handling of the
figures strongly suggest that "Abolition Frowned Down" is by the same Robinson artist
as the anonymous "Called to Account" and "Symptoms of a Duel" (nos. 1839-10 and 11).
LC-USZ62-1579 (b&w film copy neg.)
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a05367
SUMMARY: The presidential campaign of 1836 viewed as a card game by a satirist in
sympathy with the Whigs. Opposing candidates Martin Van Buren (Democrat) and
William Henry Harrison (Whig) face each other across a card table. Behind Van Buren
stands his vice-presidential running mate Richard M. Johnson. Behind Harrison is
incumbent President Andrew Jackson, who smokes a clay pipe and stands on tip-toes to
spy on Harrison's hand. With his left hand he signals to Van Buren. Jackson: "What a h--ll of a hand old Harrison's got. I'm afraid Martin and Dick Johnson will go off with a flea
in their ear." Johnson: "The old general is making signs that Harrison has the two highest
trump cards and low. Martin he'll catch your Jack and then the jig's up! You'd better beg."
Van Buren: "I ask one." Harrison: "Take it! now look out for your Jack!" On the wall
above the table is a painting of the Battle of the Thames, one of Harrison's celebrated
military victories a well as the occasion on which Johnson is reported to have slain the
Indian chief Tecumseh. The print is probably by Robinson draughtsman Edward W.
Clay, judging from its similarity to his "Grand Match Between the Kinderhook Poney ..."
(no. 1836-14) and other signed work of the period.
LC-USZ62-38851 (b&w film copy neg.)
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a39197
SUMMARY: A dramatic portrayal, clearly biased toward the northern point of view, of an incident in Congress
which inflamed sectional passions in 1856. The artist recreates the May 22 attack and severe beating of Massachusetts
senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina. Brooks's actions were provoked by
Sumner's insulting public remarks against his cousin, Senator Andrew Pickens Butler, and against Illinois senator
Stephen A. Douglas, delivered in the Senate two days earlier. The print shows an enraged Brooks (right) standing over
the seated Sumner in the Senate chamber, about to land on him a heavy blow of his cane. The unsuspecting Sumner sits
writing at his desk. At left is another group. Brooks's fellow South Carolinian Representative Lawrence M. Keitt stands
in the center, raising his own cane menacingly to stay possible intervention by the other legislators present. Clearly no
help for Sumner is forthcoming. Behind Keitt's back, concealed in his left hand, Keitt holds a pistol. In the foreground
are Georgia senator Robert Toombs (far left) and Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas (hands in pockets) looking
vindicated by the event. Behind them elderly Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden is restrained by a fifth, unidentified
man. Above the scene is a quote from Henry Ward Beecher's May 31 speech at a Sumner rally in New York, where he
proclaimed, "The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon." David Tatham attributes the
print to the Bufford shop, and suggests that the Library's copy of the print, the only known example, may have been a
trial impression, and that the print may not actually have been released. The attribution to Homer was first made by
Milton Kaplan.