Major Concepts:

Suggested lesson /activities:

1. Begin the lesson by projecting a series of Civil War photographs depicting the nature and tolls of war at the time. (See CROSSROADS--Bibliographies Essay VI for selected resources).

2. Read the following to the students: This comes from a soldier's letters home:

   I think I shall have to stay my three years in the Army. P.S. I don't know how long before I shall have to go into the field of battle. For my part I can't care. I don't feel afraid to go. I don't believe there are any Rebel bullets for me yet. If it is God's will for me to fall in the field of battle, it is my will to go and never return home.

   * * * *

   There was heavy cannonading all day and a sharp firing of infantry... I was not in the first day's fighting, but the next day I had to face the enemy bullets with my regiment. I was under fire about four hours and lay in the field of battle all night. There were three wounded in my company and one killed.

   This soldier died -- not in battle but of chronic diarrhea in a New Orleans military hospital. The soldier's grave, No. 711 in Chalmethe National Cemetery in New Orleans, is marked "Lyons Wakemen, NY" -- the name Rosetta Wakeman used to disguise her gender. A more detailed account of women who were in the Union and confederate armies can be found in "The Odyssey of Pvt. Rosetta Wakeman, Union Army" (Smithsonian, vol. 24, no. 10, January 1994).

3. Divide students into pairs. One student is to select one major battle of the Civil War and proceed to gather information about the nature of the battle and the tools of warfare used. The other student is to return to the Mexican War and gather similar information.

4. From the information collected, create a short dialogue that might have occurred between a father who had fought in the Mexican War and a son (or daughter) who had fought in the Civil War each recounting their experiences and how they were affecting him (her).

5. Using selected resources from the CROSSROADS Bibliographical Essay VI and other sources, each student will write two letters (much as Pvt. Wakeman and her parents had done) describing how the Civil War was affecting lives: one from a soldier to home and the others from home to the soldier. Ask students to select families from both the Union and Confederacy.

6. Read to the students the following comment from the novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote:

   Before the Civil War, the United States were. After the Civil War, the United States is....

   Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

   Lead a discussion of this passage, and ask students to describe how the Civil War functioned as "the crossroads of our being."

7. Have students review the texts of the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution -- XIII, XIV, and XV. Lead a discussion of how these amendments reflect changing relationships between individuals and the federal government, and between individuals and state governments. Note in particular these amendments' nationalizing effects -- the Thirteenth Amendment's dismantling of a central institution of the lives of the Southern states (and the "border" states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri); the Fourteenth Amendment's elevation of national citizenship above state citizenship, and its limitation of state governments' power over individuals; and the Fifteenth Amendment's imposing of a federal standard on an area of government and politics -- regulation of access to the vote -- traditionally left to the states. It is also important to note that these amendments did not apply to Native Americans.

8. [Recommend to interested students a brilliant, brief book by Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961).]

9. If possible, show students excerpts from the film "Glory" (1989), still perhaps the best depiction of actual military conditions during the Civil War. "Gettysburg" (1993) is also useful, as are two novels: Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels and Shelby Foote's Shiloh. [Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage is less useful, as it does not give a sense of how ideas and politics imbued the Civil War.]