Major Concepts:
Reconstruction promised African Americans a better way of life -- but Reconstruction failed by 1877, leading by the end of the century to the nation's abandonment of its African American population and the rise of a segregated South.
Objectives:
The student will be able to:
-
Describe how the life of an African American family might have looked during Reconstruction in the South.
-
Describe the nature of the white "backlash" against the emancipation of slaves and their winning of equal political status under the Constitution through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
-
Describe the economic condition of the nation -- North, South, and West -- at the close of the Civil War and explain the reasons for such phenomena as "Carpetbagging" and "Scalawagging."
-
Explain what Eric Foner meant when he wrote that Reconstruction remained "America's unfinished revolution."
Suggested lesson/activities:
-
Begin the lesson by building an outline of conditions in the nation at the close of the Civil War. Include such things as a wrecked Southern economy, massive destruction of property, uprooting of families, huge war debt, occupational forces, large internal migration of peoples, revolutionary change in Southern politics following the Civil War Amendments, and dramatic changes in Northern industries. (If available, selected excerpts from some of the final scenes of "Gone with the Wind" or from the last episodes of The Civil War would be useful introductions. As alternatives, the teacher can read aloud or have students read aloud selected excerpts from Gone with the Wind and from Geoffrey Ward's The Civil War.)
-
Each student is to select one of the items listed in the class outline and, using both primary and secondary resource material, develop a classroom display that describes the item for others to use in attaining the lesson objectives.
-
Each student is to select an industry (or company) from either the North, South, or West and trace its development from 1848 through 1880.
[Teacher's note: Activities 2 and 3 may be accomplished in small groups as well as individually.]
-
Using the displays that students have created in lesson/activity 2, each student is to write an essay that describes what he/she feels the period meant for American as a whole. Begin the essay as follows:
"Reconstruction can best be described as ..."
Back to Unit VI: "Now We Are Engaged in a Great Civil War": 1848-1880