The American Civil War: On the Eve of War

To learn more about how railroads impacted the Civil War, read this article from the Smithsonian Institution. To learn more about the management of the Union's railroads during the war, read this article from the U.S. National Archives. You can also view the Library of Congress's collection of historic railroad maps, 1828-1900.

• What is railroad track gauge?
• Why do you think there would be different sizes of track gauge? Why might this become a problem once rail systems started to connect with each other?
• What do you notice about the geographic distribution of different sizes of gauge?

View a collection of primary sources about Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from the Digital Public Library of America. See the related EDSITEment lesson plan: Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckly: The Material and Emotional Realities of Childhood in Slavery.

• What information is available on the map? How could this information be made more useful and compelling for someone trying to understand the distribution of slavery in the United States?
• What can you learn from the different representations of slavery offered by a slave narrative and the interactive map?

Learn more about the lives and experiences of free blacks in the antebellum United States with this collection of primary and secondary sources from the Library of Congress. Another rich collection of primary sources covering many aspects of black life in the antebellum United States is available from the National Humanities Center. The first African American newspaper published by free blacks was the Freedom Journal, which was first published in New York in 1827. The newspaper has been digitized and is freely available here.

• Why might free black people choose to remain in the South rather than move northward to states where slavery had been outlawed?
• How did the experiences of free black people vary based on location, gender, type of employment, education, and other factors?

• Where did the majority of immigrants live in the mid-nineteenth century?
• Many German immigrants to the United States were political exiles fleeing their country after the failed revolution of 1848. These radical Germans were often deeply committed to abolition, but they were also opposed to a major cause that overlapped with abolitionism in U.S. circles: temperance. Consider this anti-immigrant cartoon:
  

  Photo caption

  Know-Nothing Anti-Immigrant Cartoon, c.1850

  Smithsonian Magazine

• What does this cartoon suggest about the reception of immigrants in the United States?
• How do the issues of slavery, temperance, religion, and nationality intersect? Why would German abolitionists find it difficult to find a political home in the United States, even in the North where they tended to settle?

• Which state had the most valuable agricultural land? Is this surprising? Why or why not?

• What questions does this map spark? Can you think of additional information that would be helpful to display on the map? How would you display it?

• What kinds of crops were grown in the North and South? How were those crops produced? Who consumed them?

Access a curated collection of primary sources about cotton production and the expansion of slavery from the Digital Public Library of America.

Read a case study of cotton production in Mississippi.

• Why was cotton such an important commodity?
• How did cotton link the slave-based southern economy to the industrial north?

Learn more about perspectives on antebellum industrialization with the EDSITEment lesson plans: Was There an Industrial Revolution? Americans at Work Before the Civil War and Factory vs. Plantation in the North and South.

• Where was the country's industrial capacity concentrated before the war? How do you think this may have affected the conflict and subsequent outcomes of the war?
• What is the effect of comparing wage labor in the North to slavery? To what extent is this comparison accurate?
• How does the experience of former slaves living in the South after the Civil War blur the boundary between free and forced labor?