Reading Guide for Week Fourteen
Assignments
Text: Divine, Chapter 16, 4/25/00
Special Topics: The Fourteenth Amendment
The Freedmen's Bureau: Land, Labor, and Education
Answer one of the following text questions:
-
Did the South lose the Civil War but "win" Reconstruction?
Explain.
-
Was Reconstruction about economic opportunity
for the freedmen and/or civil and political rights?
-
Was the Civil War a constitutional crisis that
was resolved by Reconstruction?
Primary Source Assignment
Choose one of the following:
1) Obituary
of Andrew Johnson
Read the New York Times obituary of
Andrew Johnson, the only president before Bill Clinton to be impeached.
Then, answer all of the following questions:
-
How did Andrew Johnson get to be president of
the United States?
-
Did the person who wrote this obituary think Johnson
deserved to be impeached?
-
What other primary sources do you think ought
to be consulted in order to draw a valid conclusion about the reasons for,
and justice of Johnson's impeachment?
2) Charles Stearns, The
Black Man of the South and the Rebels, Chapter 11, "The Change
from Slavery to Freedom," pp. 111-118.
Charles Stearns was an abolitionist who, together
with his wife, moved to Columbia County, Georgia after the Civil War where
he bought a plantation that he named "Hope on Hope Ever Plantation."
Taking this background information into consideration, answer
all
of the following questions using Chapter 11 from the book he published
in 1872 about the relationship between whites and blacks in the South during
Reconstruction as your principal source:
-
How did slaves respond to being freed?
-
How did whites respond to the slaves being freed?
-
What other primary sources do you think ought
to be consulted in order to draw a valid picture of the freedmen's condition
after the Civil War?
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