Middle and High School Activity 1: Southern Cotton Plantations

Activity 1: Southern cotton plantations: To begin to understand northern responses to slavery, students examine life on a cotton plantation for enslaved people who picked the cotton used in northern U.S. and British textile mills.

One class period:

Guiding question: What was life like for enslaved people on some cotton plantations in the antebellum South? 

1.    Display Document 16: “Picking cotton near Montgomery, Alabama” for the class, or print copies for pairs of students.

2.    Have students spend two minutes studying the image. Instruct them to look up, down, left, right, center, and at the edges.

3.    Have students talk to a neighbor. Have them begin by sharing overall impressions of the image, then make a list of the people, objects, and activities they see in the image.

4.    As a class, make a list of the people, objects, and activities students noticed.

5.    Using the list they created and the caption of the image, have students work with a partner to answer the following questions:

·         What is happening in the photograph? What do you see that makes you say that?

·         Where was the photograph taken?

·         When was it taken?

·         Why is the date and location important to the subject matter?

·         Why do you think the photograph was taken?

·         What was happening in the United States at the time this photo was taken?

Class discussion:

1.    Display Document 14:  Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, Solomon Northup, 1853.

2.    Whole-class discussion “What does this quotation add to the way you view the image in Document 16?“

Homework: Students respond to one of the following writing prompts:

·         Today’s lesson made me think differently about slavery because…

·         The part of today’s lesson that had the biggest impact on me was…, because…