Unit 3: Civil War and Reconstruction

Unit Description

Starting from when our country was a loose collection of colonies, differences emerged between the two major regions of the society – the North and the South. Because of the regions’ geography and climate, the two areas developed completely different economies and cultures, and therefore different interests in the work of government.

Over time, a major difference of opinions – whether slavery should or should not exist – would tear the two groups apart and result in the most violent conflict to ever take place on American soil. The resulting freedom of African-Americans came at the expense of years of violent divisions and the creation of a “lost generation,” as both North and South lost thousands of men in the process of achieving the ideals that our country was founded upon.

And then, after a brief period of success during Reconstruction, the South again reverted back to new forms of oppression, resulting in tremendous conflicts that would continue for decades to come. The story of America’s journey from its inception to the Great Betrayal and the beginning of the Jim Crow Era begs the question – is this a country that lives up to its promise of liberty and justice for all?

Essential Question

How does the legacy of conflict affect a nation’s identity?

Themes

    • Historians must challenge the dominant historical narrative because it is often told from the perspective of the oppressor.
    • Land features create different societies and also create conflicts between people.
    • All humans have fundamental rights.
    • Social and practical innovations affect how people live throughout the course of history.

Standards Addressed

  • 7.4.1: Identify and describe the role of the election of Abraham Lincoln and other key events, ideas, and people which led to the Civil War
  • 7.4.2: Analyze important turning points and major developments during Civil War
  • 7.4.3: Describe long-term and short-term outcomes of Reconstruction
  • 7.6.1: Analyze settlement patterns of racial and ethnic groups in the United States from 1763-1877
  • 7.6.3: Analyze patterns, motivations, and the impact of rural and urban migration in the United States from 1763-1877
  • 7.6.4: Explain how differences in land use influenced cultural characteristics among regions in the United States from 1763-1877
  • 7.7.1: Explain how Americans adapted and transformed various physical environments in the United States to expand its growth and influence
  • 7.10.1: Describe the influences on and the development and expansion of individual rights and freedoms
  • 7.10.2: Identify and describe ways in which citizens influence change in a democratic society
  • 7.11.1: Explain how the demand for resources and the development of technology influenced economic diversity in the United States
  • 7.11.2: Explain how economic interdependence developed between regions of the United States and with foreign countries

Unit Outcomes

Students will know:

  • The Civil War was not the product of immediate causes, but rather the result of a long series of events and decisions that made the North and South completely different societies.
  • The differences between the industrial North and the agrarian South, and how this impacted their view of slavery
  • Though black people in the North were free, they were not treated equally and fairly
  • The expansion of our country led to conflict between the North and the South as they fought over whether the new land should allow slavery or not.
  • Compromises were attempted but often increased tensions instead of quelling them.
  • Violence erupted, whether in the form of slave rebellions or confrontations between abolitionists and and pro-slavery citizens.
  • The Election of Abraham Lincoln caused Southern states to secede out of fear that their way of life would be ruined. They formed a new country called the Confederate States of America.
  • Modern technology changed the way the war was fought, and it became an incredible violent and bloody struggle.
  • While the original stated goal of the war was to keep the Union together, Abraham Lincoln changed the goal by saying that the country was fighting to end slavery
  • Northern strengths eventually overcame the South’s ability and desire to fight the war, and the Southern army surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.
  • After the war, freedmen were given many benefits designed to ensure the South did not repeat the past. After a disputed election, protections for freedmen were removed, and the South created new systems to deny freedmen their rights

Students will be able to:

Historical Thinking:

  • Annotate documents
    • Use the different steps for different types of documents when analyzing their contents
  • Source documents
    • Identify author’s point of view/position on a historical event
    • Identify author’s purpose in producing the document
    • Consider the source’s audience
  • Contextualize sources
    • Understand how context influences content of the document
    • Recognize documents are products of particular points in time
  • Close read sources
    • Identify author’s claims about an event
    • Evaluate evidence and reasoning the author uses to support claims
    • Evaluate author’s word choice

Writing:

  • Strong body paragraphs
    • TOSEEC
    • Topic Sentences
    • 2 types of evidence
  • Strengthening evidence
    • Context
    • Extended Response
    • Introducing Text Evidence
  • Strengthening Elaborations
    • Elaboration
    • Concluding Sentence
    • Context part 2

Unit Misconceptions

Many students will assume that the Civil War was a united war of North vs. South – it was not. Slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War. We think that after the Civil War slavery ended and black people were equal to white people in the whole country. We view the Civil War in binary terms – North vs. South, before and after, slavery vs. anti-slavery. It was not. The Civil War era was nuanced, filled with differing opinions, viewpoints, and arguments on many different sides.

Students also may think that the war had only immediate causes. The causes of the Civil War stretched all the way back to the colonial era, as the North and South developed entirely different societies.

Laws passed after the Civil War did not have an immediate effect and often were not followed in reality. Students should constantly question whether the government’s promises were delivered on or not

Unit Vocabulary

  • factories: efficient production centers
  • immigrant: person who migrates from one country to a new country
  • rural: countryside
  • urban: city
  • cash crops: crops grown for sale, not for consumption by the grower
  • income: amount of money made per year
  • demand: the amount people want a product; consumer's desire and willingness to pay a price for a specific good or service.
  • Industrial Revolution: switch from making things by hand to making things by machine
  • urbanization: rapid increase in population in cities
  • class conflicts: tensions between groups of people with different economic means and needs (rich and poor)
  • Technology: new ideas and inventions that change work and quality of life
  • steamboat: technology that enabled boats to move more quickly, especially on rivers and canals.
  • The Transcontinental Railroad: connected the East and West via trains
  • The Erie Canal: canal that stretched 300 miles across New York, creating a faster and more direct route for boats to ship goods.
  • The National Road: the first highway in America; connected the eastern and western states and increased westward expansion
  • push factor:a negative reason that a group of people would want to leave a location. (Examples: lack of food, lack of safety, lack of money, war)
  • pull factor: a positive reason that a group of people would want to move to a new location. (Examples: money, opportunities, land, safety)
  • migration: moving from one place to another
  • Irish Potato Famine: blight destroyed potato crop and caused people to starve
  • Know-Nothing Party: anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic nativist political party
  • Abolitionist movement: the movement to end slavery in the United States
  • agrarian society: way of life based on agriculture
  • Frederick Douglass: prominent abolitionist
  • Harriet Tubman: most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad
  • William Lloyd Garrison: abolitionist and newspaper editor
  • Sojourner Truth: abolitionist and women’s rights activist
  • Temperance Movement: movement to ban the production and sale of alcohol in the United States.
  • Carrie Nation: leader of Temperance movement (movement to ban the sale of alcohol)
  • 18th Amendment/Prohibition: bans the sale of alcohol in the USA
  • 21st Amendment: repeals Prohibition
  • Women’s Suffrage Movement: movement to earn the right for women to vote
  • Women’s rights movement: movement for gender equality
  • Susan B. Anthony: women’s rights activist
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton: women’s rights activist
  • Seneca Falls Convention: first meeting of women’s rights activists
  • Declaration of Sentiments: list of women’s grievances, modeled on Declaration of Independence
  • 19th Amendment: granted all women the right to vote
  • suffrage: the right to vote
  • sectionalism: when you are more loyal to a region or section than the entire country
  • compromise: a settlement between two opposing sides where both sides give up something to reach the agreement
  • economy: the wealth and resources of a country or region
  • cotton gin - a simple machine invented in the 1790s that cleaned cotton exponentially faster than humans could and increased the demand for enslaved people and more farmland
  • urbanization: rapid increase in population in cities
  • abolitionist: someone who wanted slavery to be banned in the US
  • agrarian: farm-based
  • territory: an area of land that is not yet a state
  • statehood: the status of being recognized as an official state
  • Missouri Compromise: kept the balance of power and decided the future of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase
  • 36-30 line: The Missouri Compromise said that no slavery would be allowed in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36°30' latitude line
  • Compromise of 1850: California is a free state (ruined the balance of power) but gave concessions to both sides
  • Free People of Color: African-Americans who were free, but not citizens, mostly in the North
  • balance of power: equal number of slave and free states
  • Fugitive Slave Act: all Northerners need to help return runaway slaves to the South or else they will be punished
  • Nat Turner: an African-American slave who led a two-day rebellion of enslaved and free black people in Virginia in 1831
  • Kansas-Nebraska Act: said that popular sovereignty would decide whether these territories would be slave or free
  • popular sovereignty: to be decided by the vote of the people
  • Bloody Kansas: a series of violent civil confrontations between abolitionist and pro-slavery settlers in Kansas over the legality of slavery in the area
  • John Brown: abolitionist leader of violent raids against slavery
  • Dred Scott: an enslaved person who sued for his freedom after his master brought him to the north where slavery was outlawed
  • Dred Scott v. Sanford: Supreme Court decisions that said African-Americans were no longer citizens anywhere
  • Abraham Lincoln - Republican who ran and lost the Illinois Senate race in 1858 but then won the presidential election of 1860
  • Stephen Douglas- Democrat who won the Illinois Senate race against Lincoln in 1858
  • Lincoln-Douglas debates- highlighted the debate over slavery on the national stage in 1858, increasing Southerners' fear that the government would outlaw slavery
  • Republican Party: abolitionist political party founded in 1854
  • Democratic Party- founded in 1820s by Jackson; at this time was pro-slavery
  • popular sovereignty - determined by the vote of the people living in a region
  • Election of 1860: Abraham Lincoln becomes the President, the South secedes from the Union and forms Confederacy
  • secede- formally withdraw from membership; leave the United States of America
  • Confederate States of America - a republic formed in February, 1861, and composed of the 11 Southern states that seceded from the United States in order to preserve slavery (also known as the Confederacy)
  • General Robert E. Lee - commander of the Confederate Army known for his military expertise
  • Anaconda Plan - the North’s strategy to block Confederate ports and control the Mississippi River, isolating the South and cutting the Confederacy off from trade and food supplies
  • Battle of Bull Run: first battle of the Civil War
  • Battle of Antietam: bloodiest single-day battle of the War
  • Emancipation Proclamation: Abraham Lincoln says that all enslaved people in rebelling territories will be freed
  • emancipation: freedom
  • The Battle of Vicksburg - helped secure the entire Mississippi River for the Union; turning point of the Civil War
  • Battle of Gettysburg: bloodiest overall battle, turning point because the Union stopped Lee's invasion of the North
  • General Ulysses S. Grant - leader of the Union Army
  • total war: Union’s strategy against the South to destroy their will and ability to fight along with anything in their path
  • Sherman’s March: General Sherman wages total war against the Confederacy
  • Gettysburg Address - Lincoln’s speech that reminded the American people of the war’s bigger goal, proving to the world that democracy can work
  • Battle of Appomattox Courthouse: South surrenders and loses the Civil War
  • Reconstruction—the time period after the Civil War when southern states re-entered the Union and the federal government tried to protect the equal rights of black people
  • assassinate - the murder of a public figure for political or religious reasons
  • Presidential Reconstruction - President Andrew Johnson’s plan to be lenient on the South in order to reunite the Union quickly
  • Black Codes - laws passed by Southern states after the Civil War designed to keep freedmen in an inferior position to whites in the South
  • white supremacy - the racist and inaccurate belief that white people are superior to those of all other races and should therefore dominate society
  • Radical Republicans—A faction of Republicans during Reconstruction who wanted harsh penalties on Southern states.
  • Radical Reconstruction - Radical Republicans’ plan punish the South by creating harsh terms for them to re-enter the Union
  • amendments - changes to the law or Constitution
  • Reconstruction Amendments: the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments passed during Reconstruction with the intent of protecting the equal rights of black people
  • The 13th Amendment - outlawed slavery.
  • The 14th Amendment - guaranteed equal citizenship and prevented states from taking away the rights of American citizens.
  • The 15th Amendment - granted African-American men the right to vote.
  • Freedmen’s Bureau: set up to assist freedmen with adjusting to their new independent lives
  • Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 - law that sent the military back to the Confederate states, forcing them to follow the Reconstruction Amendments and to rewrite their state constitutions so they could re-enter the Union
  • credit - borrowing money with the agreement of later payment, usually plus extra money
  • sharecropping- a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop
  • rent-pay someone for the use of something
  • poverty- having little to no money
  • debt- owing money
  • exploited- overworking or underpaying someone
  • Compromise of 1877- led to the military withdrawal from the South and the return to unchecked white supremacy in the South
  • Ku Klux Klan- a white supremacist group that rose during Reconstruction and tries to control and disenfranchise black citizens through fear tactics
  • Jim Crow - the time period after Reconstruction when laws were passed the enforced racial segregation in the South
  • segregation - the enforced separation of different racial groups
  • disenfranchisement - depriving someone of the right to vote