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AP U.S. History Lesson Plans...
Introduction
Our understanding of how slaves constructed a viable culture derives from a wide range of primary sources. Firsthand accounts -- both black and white -- are important sources for reconstructing life under slavery. They establish how slaves coped with their environment through work, worship, and kinship networks. Plantation records and the ephemera of slavery, such as runaway advertisements, supplement these narratives. Increasingly, evidence mounts for the material world of slavery as archaeologists and architectural historians tease out the rhythms, networks, and material world of African Americans both on and off the plantation. More and more is known about where slaves lived, the work they did, what they ate and wore, and the consumer goods they used. The Gullah culture of the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry reflects the black majority of that region and the persistence of African traditions in a creolized society. Furthermore, the relative independence of movement of slaves who worked in the task-labor regime of the lowcountry rice region -- as opposed to gang labor in tobacco, cotton, and sugar regions -- also shaped regional slave cultures. However, critical issues about sources remain, notably the white lenses that filtered many firsthand accounts. Sometimes even material objects as seemingly straightforward as a wine bottle pose interpretive problems. The ambiguity of these sources and the conflicting viewpoints they convey underscore the problems of oversimplifying slaves and the world they made.
Objectives
Teaching with Primary Sources
Life and Work on a Plantation
Other Useful Sites
Objectives
- To understand how enslaved African Americans used religion and family to create a viable culture and ameliorate the effects of slavery.
- To understand the plantation system from the multiple perspectives and roles of their owners, their families, hired white workers, and enslaved African Americans.
- To consider the wide range of primary sources associated with slave culture and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.
Teaching with Primary Sources
Census Data
The United States Historical Census Data Browser provides students with demographic data that will help them understand the growth of slavery. Although the site is not designed as a tool for downloading or manipulating census data, it offers a wealth of information. The data are organized by census year and state, according to a table of census categories. The site also will graphically display selected data by category, state, or county.
 United States Historical Census Data Browser
Census records begin with the 1790 census, which is noteworthy for its detailed distinctions in data about slaveholders and slaves. In 1800 and 1810, the census collected data in broader categories, a trend only reversed in 1820. Before 1840, the census only collected population data. The 1840 census began also to compile data on the economy (by industry and profession), including schools and universities. The 1850 census was even wider in scope; it included data on the free colored population, churches, and religion; libraries; manufacturing; schools, education, and literacy; slave population; total population, marriages, births, and deaths; and the white population. The 1860 census further differentiated these categories by adding ones for manufacturing and land value, agriculture, and "other racial/ethnic groups " (Indians, people of mixed race, Asian, native- and foreign-born blacks, and mulattos).
Students might use these data in a variety of ways. They could follow particular data sets across time or by county or state. These data are, of course, more useful for describing aggregate populations than for tracing the formation of slave families. But they do allow effective comparisons among the states. They are also useful as a window on politics. Asking students to account for changes in the census data categories will underscore related changes in the political climate (especially in 1790, 1820, and 1850) and the relative resources of northern, southern, and border states. The precise detail captured in the 1790 census on slaveholding, for example, could be related to the compromises over ratification; the data allow students to map out how differently representation would have looked had slaves not counted toward total population. Do not overlook the site's graphing capabilities. They allow students to visualize raw data.
For an exercise, students might usefully pair census data with one slaveholding family's records, containing wills, tax records, and the slave census of the Constantine Perkins Fitzpatrick family. The family migrated from Morgan County, Georgia, to Macon County, Alabama, between 1838 and 1840. Ask students to place these records in the context of the two counties and states. Ask them to speculate on the Fitzpatricks' motivations for migrating westward. Similarly, students might use census data to construct the historical context for one or more of the plantation sites described below.
Slaveholding Family's Records
Slave Narratives and First-Person Accounts
There are several outstanding Web sites devoted to African American history. Antebellum American History links to a number of Web resources for the period 1812-1864. Documenting the American South at the University of North Carolina has electronic texts of materials in five areas: slave narratives, first-person narratives, southern literature, Confederate imprints, and materials related to role of the church in the black community. The collection of first-person narratives includes the writings of both black and white Southerners. Where appropriate, these materials extend into the twentieth century. The title pages and illustrations in the original publications have been digitized along with the text, and images may be browsed separately. The electronic texts are supplemented by comprehensive bibliographies, arranged both alphabetically and chronologically.
Antebellum American History
Documenting the American South
Several other sites also have online slave narratives. American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology contains some of the 2,300 narratives of ex-slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration, with images and biographies of the excerpted narrators. The University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center maintains African American resources from its Special Collections. The American Memory Web site at the Library of Congress (LOC) maintains texts from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives. The LOC sites are searchable and contain documents, photographs, maps, sound, and film clips.
American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center
American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
The LOC American Memory site contains electronic texts of two pamphlet collections as well as a link to the Ohio Historical Society's collection on the African American experience in Ohio. Students who have used census data to look at free blacks and slaves in the North might also look at a site on slavery in Connecticut and one devoted to the Lott House in Brooklyn. Students interested in how free blacks lived should look at Free Blacks: Archaeology of African American Life in Alexandria, Virginia.
LOC American Memory Web Site
Slavery in Connecticut
Lott House
Free Blacks: Archaeology of African American Life in Alexandria, Virginia
Lessons might be planned around particular slave narratives. Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl may be used as the focus for a study of slave culture from several vantages: as a work written by a woman, as a picture of slave family interactions, and as an illustration of the psychological impact of slavery. It also can be used as a springboard for the issue of authenticity in slave narratives. Finally, because her brother John S. Jacobs also wrote his own narrative, A True Tale of Slavery (which is not available electronically but has been published in inexpensive print editions), Harriet Jacobs's experiences have a familiar, intimate counterpart and foil. Images linked to her narrative are also effective ways of materializing her life. Consult also a set of lesson plans that use her narrative as a window on the history of the black family in American literature and art.
Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Images
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Lesson Plans
You could select other narratives because they shed particular interest on certain topics. The following list points out narratives of particular interest for studying slave culture. Pay particular attention to the narratives that emphasize religion and the family. All of the following are available at the Documenting the American South Web site:
- Charles Ball describes a slave funeral and its traditional African customs; he also compares working conditions on tobacco and cotton plantations.
- Henry Bibb discusses conjuration.
- John Brown has bells and horns fastened on his head.
- William Wells Brown is tied up in a smokehouse.
- Lewis Clarke discusses the impact of slavery on family life and the implements his mistress used to beat him.
- Frederick Douglass describes the circumstances of whippings.
- Olaudah Equiano describes West African religious beliefs and practices.
- Josiah Henson describes slave housing, diet, and clothing.
- Lunsford Lane describes the moment when he first realized the meaning of slavery.
- James Martin describes a slave auction.
- Solomon Northup describes working conditions on a Louisiana cotton plantation.
- James W. C. Pennington analyzes the impact of slavery upon childhood.
- Peter Randolph describes the religious "gathers " slaves held without supervision.
- Moses Roper describes his punishment for attempting to run away.
- Jacob Stroyer recalls the material conditions of slave life and the material conditions of his childhood.
Documenting the American South Web Site
The world of free blacks is less well represented online, although the Census Browser has data on the free black population. Jason Poole's "On Borrowed Ground: Free African American Life in Charleston, South Carolina 1810-61 " is useful for background on free blacks in the urban South.
United States Historical Census Data Browser
On Borrowed Ground: Free African American life in Charleston, South Carolina, 1810-61
The Images of Slavery
Representing Slavery: A Roundtable Discussion provides thoughtful discussions of the problems that beset sources for the material world of slaves, including living-history interpretations, the depiction of slavery in fiction and on film, visual images of slavery, and the slaves' aural world. Alex Bontemps's discussion in "Seeing Slavery: How Paintings Make Words Look Different " will challenge students asked to interpret the contemporary images of slavery. A wealth of images of slavery exists, but for the most part these either are stock printers' marks (such as those used to illustrate runaway advertisements) or appeared in antislavery publications. Bontemps points out that slaves were only rarely given individuality in images.
Representing Slavery: A Roundtable Discussion
Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency explores "the relationship between art and politics in the Civil War era " through digital images of Confederate notes illustrated with scenes of slave labor. The site also has an overview of the Civil War and brief essays on the economy and paper money in the mid-nineteenth century.
Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency
The Digital Schomburg: Images of Nineteenth-Century African Americans Web site has searchable, digital images of slaves.
The Digital Schomburg: Images of Nineteenth-Century African Americans Web Site
The LOC maintains American Political Prints, 1766-1877, a Web site of political cartoons and other print images. You can browse this site by year or search by topic or name.
American Political Prints, 1766-1877
You can study white perceptions of slaves' cultural attributes using images of runaway advertisements. Radford University's African American Web site maintains the texts of runaway advertisements from colonial newspapers. You can also use these primary sources as tools to understand and interpret the conditions of slavery, as discussed in lesson plans keyed to the NCSS Thematic Strand: Time, Continuity, and Change.
Runaway Slave Advertisements
More Runaway Slave Advertisements
Thematic Strand: Time, Continuity, and Change Lesson Plans
As an exercise, students could compile sets of images of slavery, then compare them with a printer's specimen and runaway advertisements. Do text and image agree in the advertisements? How do stock images shape our understanding of the slaves? Finally, ask students to evaluate the works of Jonathan Green, a lowcountry artist of the African American South; Green leaves his men and women "faceless. " Ask your students to speculate why Green employs this strategy. Is he simply making his own observation? Or has he unwittingly continued a long-standing tradition in the visual depiction of African Americans?
Printer's Specimen
Jonathan Green
The Sounds of Slavery
It is also difficult for us to "hear " the world that the slaves inhabited. The aural world that slaves produced was different from the white world -- in funerals, work cadences, and announcing success in hunting -- and we are only beginning to apprehend the cultural meaning of that difference. Whites often experienced a sense of cultural dissonance, even though that aural world was culturally evocative for the slaves who produced it and lived within it. Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Negro Spirituals, " published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867, contains the observations of the commander of the First Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers, the Union's first black military unit. Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment, unavailable electronically, supplements this with his acute descriptions of the aural world of the former slaves under his command. Students might also look at William Francis Allen, et al., Slave Songs of the United States, 1867, which compiles the words and music for 136 songs, arranged by state. The American Memory site of the LOC has a section devoted to African American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, which contains many images.
"Negro Spirituals," by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Slave Songs of the United States
African American Sheet Music, 1850-1920
Life and Work on a Plantation
The Plantation System
Several Web sites explore the cultural and material landscapes of the plantation. The National Park Service's When Rice Was King discusses three rice plantations in lowcountry South Carolina, linked to schematic maps and images of a slave cabin, the great house, a kitchen building, and a rice mill and rice mill chimney. It also incorporates lesson plans dealing with plantation layout, resident interviews, the plantation economy, and the cultural contributions made by different groups.
National Park Service's "When Rice Was King"
South Carolina maintains a Web site devoted to a wide range of topics, such as the slave trade, slave families, sickness and mortality in the slave community, slave burial and funeral traditions, slave revolts, personal narratives of South Carolina slaves, slave demographic data, Native American slavery, free blacks and Freedmen, black soldiers and sailors, and white Carolinians' writings about slaves and slavery. These materials are complemented by Third Person, First Person, a site maintained by Duke University, with texts and images from its Special Collections relating to Caesar, a slave with a history of running away; the slave trade; plantation work; slaves as pawns of the British and the Americans in the Revolutionary War; and the Civil War.
South Carolina Web Site on African Americans, 1525-1865
Third Person, First Person
The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation, a District of Columbia Public Library exhibit based on John Vlach's Back of the Big House, explores the physical and cultural landscape of the plantation. The exhibit was shown originally at LOC, but it was pulled down hours after opening, as black workers objected to some of its images, in particular one with a mounted overseer among field workers; the protesters thought he was carrying a gun. It has interpretive text and images on slave tasks, the quarters, religion, and skills and talents. If you use this site, have your students also read the transcript of an interview between Charlayne Hunter-Gault and John Vlach on the controversial LOC exhibition. See the Lives of African American Slaves in South Carolina in the Eighteenth Century Web site for background and images from that state.
The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation
Interview Between Charlayne Hunter-Gault and John Vlach
Lives of African American Slaves in South Carolina in the Eighteenth Century
Labor Systems
The Web site for Middleton Place Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, discusses the differences between task and gang labor systems and their relationship to different staple crops. The Resource Bank of PBS's Africans in America Web site has images of the rice harvest. The South Carolina State Museum's site on African American cultural history deals with rice cultivation, as well as crafts, Gullah, and slave tags.
Middleton Place Plantation
Resource Bank of PBS's Africans in America Web Site
Images of the Rice Harvest
South Carolina State Museum's site on African American Cultural History
The Material Culture of Slavery
Several Web sites explore the material culture of slavery on particular plantations. The site for Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest has slave biographies and images of the archaeological excavations. Students can look at images of colonoware pottery excavated from Flowerdew Hundred. The Stratford Hall Web site has a site plan in the archaeology section showing the plantation's clay pit, east garden, smokehouse, and reconstructed slave quarters. The Web site for the Levi Jordan Plantation in Brazoria, Texas, studies the symbolic orientation and layout of a slave magician-conjurer's cabin. Reenactments of slave life are outlined in the Carter's Grove Web site.
Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest
Selected Artifacts from Flowerdew Hundred
Stratford Hall
Levi Jordan Plantation
Carter's Grove
Because most of the sites that deal with the material culture of slaves employ recovered artifacts as direct testimonies to the slaves' material world, it is useful to have students read Martha Zierden's "Object Lessons: The Journey of Miles Brewton's Bottle. " This article reconstructs the journey of a monogrammed wine bottle from the home of a member of colonial Charleston's elite across an urban swamp to a refuse dump in an unrelated household. For Zierden, the bottle's unlikely final resting place underscores the point that although blacks and whites lived together, they inhabited separate worlds. The two groups used the same consumer goods, but in different ways that cause us to rethink how the groups interacted. For further background, see also the literature review on the material culture of slavery by Ivory J. Cainion. The National Park Service also maintains an informative site on Southern farms and plantations, a collection of critical essays on topics such as "The Southern Plantation As a Cultural Landscape: Black and White Perceptions, " "The Architecture and Material Culture of Slavery, " "Studies in Slave Family and Domestic Life, " and "Slave and Free Black Communities.
"Object Lessons: The Journey of Miles Brewton's Bottle."
Literature Review on the Material Culture of Slavery
Southern Farms and Plantations
Considering Multiple Perspectives
Slave narratives and first-person accounts offer a range of perspectives: master, slave, former slave, free blacks, and white plantation worker. The key is finding appropriate matches. Critical issues in the use of slave narratives are discussed by the Documenting the American South Web site. Students might compare and contrast the narratives written by South Carolina slaves with the opinions of white South Carolinians on slavery.
Critical Issues in the Use of Slave Narratives
Narratives Written by South Carolina Slaves
Opinions of White South Carolinians on Slavery
You might also organize an exercise around the influential southern travel accounts of Frederick Law Olmsted. Texts are available for his Journey in the Seaboard States, 1856, as well as for The Cotton Kingdom, 1853. Either one might be paired, for example, with the perspective of plantation mistress Fanny Kemble in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, which deals with Butler Island Plantation in Georgia. What observations did Olmsted and Kemble make in common? Where did they diverge?
Journey in the Seaboard States
The Cotton Kingdom
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839
John Blackford's Ferry Hill Plantation Journal: January 4 , 1838-January 15, 1839 is the plantation journal of a small, mixed-crop (grain, hay, fruit, and livestock) plantation in western Maryland. Along with its data on plantation management, it deals indirectly with the social life of both whites and blacks on the plantation.
Students might also look at a Web site devoted to the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin on American culture. Students might stage all or part of The Christian Slave, a play based on the novel. Or they might vet the material or cultural world presented in the dramatization with what they have gleaned in this lesson. Similarly, students could apply the same critical method to the illustrations from one or more of the editions.
Impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin on American Culture
A multivalent collection of perspectives is presented in a University of Virginia site. The documents include a broadside of "The Sorrows of Yambu, or The Negro Woman's Lamentation, " an antislavery circular, a Virginia broadside warning of the dire consequence of electing Thomas Jefferson president, a diary entry that recounts an incident when Africans interfered with a slaving ship, receipts and bills of sale, runaway advertisements, slaveholders' registers and account books, a notice for the hiring of free black laborers, a letter from a freed slave in Liberia to her former owner, and a petition from Thomas Wentworth Higginson for equality of pay between white and black soldiers. Ask your students to make sense of such a welter of primary documents in a practice DBQ format. Do the documents support the argument that religion was a solace when resistance was ineffective? Or do they support the assertion that religion was a wellspring of resistance?
A Multivalent Collection of Perspectives from the University of Virginia
Other Useful Sites
Language
Several aspects of Gullah heritage are addressed in a site on West African influences on African American language, arts and crafts, food, and religion; this site includes a Gullah dictionary and phrase book. See also Gullah Heritage: The Language of the Sea Islands and The Gullah/Geechee-Sierra Leone Connection.
Gullah Heritage
Gullah Heritage: The Language of the Sea Islands
Dress
The Costume Society of America has a series of videocassettes for purchase on slave clothing and dress, including The Clothing of Slavery: Records from the Monticello Plantation, 1794-1824; Fashions for Freedom: Discovering Slave Dress; and Meanings Lost and Found: Interdisciplinary Methodologies for Interpreting Dress in Historical Context.
Costume Society of America Videos
Pottery
Many of the objects uncovered by archaeologists are colonoware, the pottery probably made and used by slaves. The African influences in colonoware have received considerable attention. An article by Kerry Lynn Ogata looks at the medical use of colonoware by African American women.
Medical Use of Colonware
Food
Several Web sites discuss African American foodways and provide a bibliography of the subject.
African American Foodways
Bibliography of Southern Food
AP U.S. History Lesson Plans...
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