American Yawp Expectations Southern Life 1861 Period History Prompts Discussions

Prompt 1:

Read, Think, and Discuss:

American Yawp, Chapter 10

Primary Sources

David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles (Boston, 1829), pp. 22-39

Excerpt from Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners in America, 1832

Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in the United States (Savannah, Ga., 1842), pp. 206-219

Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

A Member of the Ladies Home Missionary Society Visits Five Points, 1854

The first half of the nineteenth-century was marked by the growth of cities, the introduction of new people, and an increase in industrialization. Many Americans were frightened by these changes and looked to their churches for answers in an era known as the Second Great Awakening. Religion provided one solution to what many Americans saw as the nation’s ills. But it was not the only solution. According to the authors of the documents above, what was going wrong with the young nation and what did they propose to right those wrongs? Respond to the prompt below in your initial post to this week’s discussion forum by 11.30pm Tuesday. Make at least 4 thoughtful follow-up posts throughout the week. This discussion forum will close at 11.30pm Friday.

For each of this week’s online primary sources, identify (in your own words– do not cut-and-paste from documents) one problem and one solution to that problem as offered by each author. Indicate the sources used for each and be sure to use all five sources.

Prompt 2:

Writing Assignment

American Yawp, Chapter 11 and Chapter 12

Primary Sources

Images

Nebraska Sketches, 21 May 1859, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

Puget Sound & Mt. Rainer, 1854

Charles Deas, The Death Struggle, 1854

Forcing Slavery down the throat of a Free Soiler, 1856, Harper’s Weekly

Documents

Pacific Railroad Survey, Northern Route, 1853

Horse Market in Sonora, in Frank Maryatt, Mountains and Molehills, or Recollections of a Burnt Journal (London, 1855), p. 273

E. T. Austin to S. F. Perry, 5 Mar. 1852, James Franklin Perry and Stephen Samuel Perry Papers, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin

Who May be Citizens of the United States, 15 May 1858, Harper’s Weekl

Mary Ballou, “This Muddy Place,” 1852

H. H. Spaulding to Stephen Prentiss, 6 Apr. 184

Excerpts from the United States vs. Telokite et al

Petition to Sue for Freedom, Dred Scott, filed April 6, 1846, Dred Scott Case Collection

Maria Perkins to Richard Perkins, 7 Oct. 1852

**Note: You will not have access to the writing assignment dropbox if you did not complete the plagiarism quiz during Week 1.

Once you have read this week’s chapter in American Yawp and analyzed the primary sources listed in the links above, consider again the theme of expectations and outcomes. How do this week’s readings shape your understanding of early Americans’ expecations versus their lived experiences? Do this week’s readings support your earlier argument? Do they make you rethink it? Add to your essay using at least 2 images and 2 documents listed under primary sources above. Use your textbook for context.

For this week’s writing assignment:

Write a paragraph that answers the prompt on expectations and outcomes as releflected in this week’s readings. This paragraph will serve as a transition between Writing Assignments 3 and 4. The paragraph should again have a thesis statement (argument) and lay out the theme(s) you will discuss from this week’s readings. Underline/highlight your thesis statement.

Then, add to your essay, using at least 2 images and 2 documents from the list above as support your main argument this week. Be sure to use your textbook for context.

As you analyze this week’s sources and textbook chapter, consider the following:

Many Americans relished the thought of pushing national boundaries ever further outward. Every step seemed to open up new opportunities. Yet, not every American was enamored with the idea of westward expansion, and many early supporters soon became discouraged, too.

Who benefitted from expansion? Who suffered from it?

Images often tell us one story while documents tell us another. How do the images you chose compare with the documents?

Name your file LastNameWA4. Submit your completed, revised essay to the designated dropbox by 11.30pm Friday. Continue your discussion in the Weeks 10 & 11 discussion forum. I encourage you to add to your comments using this week’s sources. The discussion forum will close at 11.30pm Friday.

Prompt 3:

Primary Sources

Images

Lewis Miller’s watercolor

Documents

Southerner Rights Segars, Salomon Brothers of New York (1859)

Letters of Margaretta Mason and Lydia Child (1860)

Lincoln’s 1st Inaugural Address (1861)

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union” (1861)

Robert Harney to Samuel McDowell Reid, 22 Dec. 1827, and Reid’s reply

Virginia Slave Hire Agreement, 31 Dec. 1846

Georgia Slave Sale Agreement, 1 Nov. 1836

Excerpt of a letter from a North Carolina Slave Trader, 11 Feb. 1828

How did Americans envision their lives and their futures during the years prior to the Civil War? Use nformation from the textbook and this week’s Primary Sources to answer the question in your initial post to this week’s Discussion Forum by 11.30pm Tuesday. Post your follow-ups throughout the week. This discussion forum will close at 11.30pm next Friday. Use the watercolor image and at least 2 documents in your initial response.

As you prepare your response, consider the following:

What impressions of southern life evident in the images and documents?

Who was likely to support abolition? Abolitionists? Why?

What are some examples of competing visions of America?

Prompt 4:

Read, Think, and Write:

Read American Yawp, Chapter 15

Read this excerpt from “A History They Can Use: The Memphis Massacre and Reconstruction’s Public History Terrain,” written by University of Memphis Department of History professors Susan O’Donovan and Beverly Bond:

On May 20^th and 21^st, a group of scholars, students, and public historians gathered at the University of Memphis to discuss a dramatic event often overlooked in the narrative of Reconstruction, the Memphis Massacre of 1866. The symposium, and the Memphis Massacre Project, informed the public about the massacre and began a difficult and necessary conversation about how Americans approach the history of Reconstruction–how we rethink and repurpose existing spaces and create new public spaces to reflect on that history. The symposium’s directors, Dr. Beverly Bond and Dr. Susan O’Donovan, spoke with Muster about their work and their hopes for the project’s future.

From the capture of Memphis by Union forces in June 1862 through the final surrender of the Confederacy in April 1865, Memphis experienced dramatic demographic, social, and economic change. Thousands of enslaved African Americans fled area farms and plantations for sanctuary in the city. These new arrivals were housed in camps near the Union Army’s Ft. Pickering, on President’s Island, and in surrounding areas. After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African American men were allowed to enlist into segregated units of the U.S.C.T. Some of these soldiers were garrisoned at Ft. Pickering and a U.S.C.T unit from Ft. Pickering was among the black soldiers killed in the 1864 Ft. Pillow massacre, about forty miles north of the city.

The city’s white population also changed during the Civil War. Some Confederate sympathizers left the city to fight with the Confederate army or to refuge deeper into Confederate-held areas. Union military personnel, northern businessmen or war profiteers, teachers and other agents of northern missionary aid societies, and Freedman’s Bureau officials and workers poured into the city. As conflict wound down, some self-exiled white Memphians, returned to the city, hoping to take advantage of President Andrew Johnson’s generous amnesty programs and to reclaim homes and other property. Control of city services shifted back to civilian authorities.

These Memphis populations – newly emancipated African Americans, former Confederates (including many former slaveholders), former free people of color, ethnic whites (including many Irish immigrants), northern military and civilians – were negotiating the new terrain of freedom in the post-Civil War south. As was the case across much of the former Confederacy, white Southerners wanted to confine black Southerners to the narrowest of freedoms. White Memphians were willing to concede the end of slavery, the right to marry, and the right of former slaves to assume responsibility for the economic support of their families, but were not willing to extend full equality, full citizenship or even the fullest exercise of free labor to their black neighbors. Touting the presence of “surplus” African Americans in the overcrowded city, and beginning as early as fall 1865, white civilians and city government officials, sometimes with the complicity of the Union Army and the Freedman’s Bureau, encouraged (or pressured) black Memphians to return to the countryside to satisfy the labor needs of white farmers and planters.

This volatile situation in the spring of 1866 engendered a series of minor confrontations between black soldiers at Ft. Pickering and members of the Memphis police, which escalated into a much larger massacre, a three-day wave of violence that left at least forty-six African American men, women and children dead. Other black Memphians were beaten and/or driven out of the city. Every African American church and schoolhouse was destroyed, homes and businesses were burglarized and burned, and at least five women were raped. Within weeks, a Congress that had already been at logger-heads with President Johnson over Reconstruction policy, dispatched a delegation to Memphis to investigate the massacre and its origins. What they learned, and how they responded to that new knowledge, led to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, changed the course of Reconstruction, and with it, the constitutional underpinnings of the nation. And then, as a nation, we “forgot” about Memphis along with the rest of Reconstruction’s history.

View “Reconstruction in America” from the Equal Justice Initiative (below)

Primary Sources

Documents

• Contract between A. T. Oliver and Cummins et al., 1 July 1865

• Capt. Charles C. Soule to Gen’l O. O. Howard, 12 June 1865

• Henry Bram et al. to Major General O. O. Howard, [20 or 21 Oct. 1865]

• Toney Golden et al to Col. H F Sickles, 28 Nov. 1865

• Mississippi “Black Codes,” U.S. Congress, Senate, “Reports of the Assistant Commissioners of Freedmen, and a Synopsis of Laws Respecting Persons of Color in the Late Slave States,” Senate Executive Documents, 39th Cong., 2nd sess., No. 6, serial 1276, pp. 190-97

Once you have read this week’s chapter in American Yawp and analyzed the primary sources listed in the links above, consider again (and for the final time this semester!) the question the theme of expectations and outcomes. How do this week’s readings/viewing shape your understanding of early Americans’ expecations versus their lived experiences? Do this week’s readings support your earlier argument? Do they make you rethink it?

For this week’s writing assignment:

• Write a paragraph that answers the prompt on expectations and outcomes as releflected in this week’s readings. This paragraph will serve as a transition between Writing Assignments 4 and 5. The paragraph should again have a thesis statement (argument) and lay out the theme(s) you will discuss from this week’s readings. Underline/highlight your thesis statement.
• Then, add to your essay, using at least primary sources from the list above as support your main argument this week. Use your textbook, the excerpt above from “History They Can Use,” and the video for context.

Name your file LastName WA4. Submit your completed assignment to the designated dropbox by 1130pm Friday.

**Note: You will not have access to the writing assignment dropbox if you did not complete the plagiarism quiz during Week 1.