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Analysis Worksheet: Boston Abolitionists Warn of Slave Catchers
This worksheet helps students to analyze a poster about the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Slavery: Acts of Resistance
In this activity students compare an excerpt of a WPA interview with an ex-slave with a more famous statement by Frederick Douglass to arrive at their own interpretations of slave resistance. This lesson is designed to work with the film Doing As [...]
Running for Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Law and the Coming of the Civil War
This activity compares a runaway slave ad and an abolitionist poster to explore the causes and effects of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. The law changed how many northerners viewed slavery and intensified conflicts that brought the nation closer to [...]
Map of Free and Slave States in 1856
This map identifies which states and territories of the United States allowed slavery and which did not in 1856, five years before the start of the Civil War. The slaveholding border states included Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and [...]
Background Essay on Slave Communities and Resistance
This short essay explains how historians came to focus not just on what slavery did to enslaved people, but what enslaved people did for themselves within the limits set by this brutal institution.
Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, 1861
During the 1850s, hundreds of thousands of enslaved African Americans were sold by owners in the upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee) to owners in the lower South (Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, [...]
Militant Abolitionists Rescue a Fugitive Enslaved Man in Troy, New York
Militant black and white abolitionists organized opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act. In 1859 Harriet Tubman, a former enslaved person and leader of the underground railroad, played a central role in rescuing Charles Nalle. Nalle, who had run away [...]
Gender, Sex, and Slavery
In this activity students read about slavery's effect on women from the perspectives of an enslaved woman and a plantation mistress. Then students create a dialogue between the two women.
A Formerly Enslaved Man Describes the Environmental Difficulties of Escape (1857)
William J. Anderson was enslaved for 24 years. In 1836, he escaped enslavement and fled from a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Anderson eventually settled in Indiana. As a free man, Anderson became a successful farm and business owner and [...]
Plans for Central Park (1858)
This 1857 map depicts plans for Central Park by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. The red rectangle denotes the area of Seneca Village, which spanned 82nd street to 89th street in New York City. Founded in 1825, Seneca [...]