Of the many differences between America today and America during the House Divided era is the relationships between politicians and persons of a more controversial quality. 150 years ago, politicians associated and communicated with persons whose national stature would make such contact disastrious today. For example is a letter written by the infamous John Brown to Massachusetts Congressman Eli Thayer. In the letter, Brown asks Thayer, a Republican and adamant free-soiler, “to have Mr. ALLEN & Co. send me by express one or two navy-sized revolvers as soon as may be.” Putting aside the fact that Brown speaks of shipping weapons very casualy, it is both interesting and astonishing that a U.S. Congressman was so openly conspiraring with a notorious figure like Brown. It is not something likely to happen today.

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln website recently inlcuded a link to samples of New Lincoln Documents.  The site offers a sample of pieces that Lincoln either authored or upon which he penned “substantial” endorsements.  Any fan of Lincoln should be intrigued to learn that none of these documents appeared in prior collections of Lincoln’s papers.  Although personal letters make up the bulk of this new subset, the compilation also includes government documents and endorsements.   For those who simply cannot get enough Lincoln, this is certainly a site to visit in the near future!

I want to highlight an interesting letter that James Buchanan wrote about a week after President Abraham Lincoln’s Inauguration on March 4, 1861. Despite four “stormy and turbulent” years in the White House, Buchanan told New York Herald editor James Bennett that ultimately “[his] administration [had] been eminently successful in its foreign & domestic policy.” Seven southern states seceded before he left office, but Buchanan believed that the crisis was unavoidable. “No human wisdom could have prevented” the “sad events [that had] recently occurred,” as Buchanan explained. Whether the Civil War was inevitable has been the subject of debate ever since, but most historians criticize his response to the secession crisis.  (Historians who participated in CSPAN’s 2009 Presidential Leadership Survey ranked Buchanan as the worst Chief Executive).Yet perhaps the most interesting part of this letter is Buchanan’s confident stance about how “the public & posterity [would] judge” him. “I feel conscious that I have done my duty…& that I shall at last receive justice,” as Buchanan wrote.

Buchanan also defended his role during the secession crisis in Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (1866), which you can access through Their Own Words.

Explorepahistory.com is a great resource for teachers of Pennsylvania, BUT it is also useful to ALL scholars, historians, teachers and students of the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.

The website provides images and explanations of every historical marker in Pennsylvania including The Christiana Riot, William Still, Frederick Douglass and John Brown. There are also lesson plans focused on the use of primary documents. For teachers who wish to address the myths associated with the Underground Railroad and topics that are often overlooked, this site is very useful.

There is a high school lesson entitled: “There Were Many Paths to Freedom.” In this lesson plan, students are challenged to rethink misconceptions and stereotypes of the Underground Railroad. Then students read original documents related to the varied experiences of runaways, including William and Ellen Craft, Anthony Burns, and Henry “Box” Brown. The third part of the lesson allows students to role-play a meeting of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, which conducted interviews of fugitive slaves who reached Philadelphia and decided how they would assist them.

There is also another lesson entitled “How Far to Freedom?” where students create a “Big Book on the Life of William Parker” after reading excerpts of his narrative. Overall, this website provides teachers and students a tremendous amount of primary documents and interactive activities that reveal significant runaways and vigilant activists of the Underground Railroad.

If your class is going to study the Underground Railroad, one website you should check out is Documenting the American South (DocSouth). The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has put together a great collection of primary sources, including slave narratives published before 1920. To see a list of what they have available, go here. Besides the full text of books, DocSouth has great supplementary material for almost every title. On Frederick Douglass, for example, the site provides a short biography and related primary sources. While students may be familiar with Douglass or Harriet Tubman, they can find on DocSouth many new interesting stories from fugitive slaves like Solomon Northup and William Wells Brown.

CivilWarHome.com is a great site with a ton of information on life during the civil war. Their main page is separated in several categories including Medicine, Biographies, and Essays each with numerous links and descriptions for subcategories.

I ran into a great site today with tons of transcribed documents from the civil war. There are several categories to choice from including Soldiers Letters, Battle Reports, and Diaries. Its a great place to gain an insight on everyday life throughout the civil war.

The U.S. National Park Service has a wealth of information on some of the key battlefields of the Civil War. Not least among them is Gettysburg, located nearby Dickinson College in Adams County, PA. Along with pages discussing the battlefield itself, the National Park Service features a web exhibit of the day-to-day life of Civil War soldiers. The site includes definitions of some Civil War era military terms and brief descriptions of what soldiers of the time would have experienced during their long encampments. Most interesting are the image galleries included in the site. These are contemporary, high quality digital images of artifacts related to encampment life. Among these artifacts are game boards, musical instruments, diaries, letters, and personal photographs. Certainly a site worth checking out!

I stumbled across a great site today called Picture History. It has a lot of great scans of original letters and pictures from the time period. I ran across the site while researching Grace Bedell, the young girl influential enough to convince President Lincoln to grow his beard. They have scanned and posted the letter Lincoln wrote back. There are many other documents to browse around through.

This site was created especially for teachers and has a very clear, but yet brief, overview of the Dred Scott case. In addition, both Taney’s majority decision and the two dissenting opinions are provided so that students can read the debate from both sides. This site is brief enough to keep students’ attentions and integrates primary source documents into its material without becoming cumbersome.