A recent USA Today article provides a good overview of some of the best new Lincoln books upcoming in the run up to the bicentennial of his birth in 2009.   The article features information about James McPherson’s new work, Tried by War, a study of Lincoln as Commander-In-Chief.  Along the way, the story provides some interesting new stories from McPherson about his own career and how he has worked over the years with his wife Patricia or Pat on various historical projects. 

Today I was reading over the House Divided blog, and I came across the Civil War tag. This tag provoked me to search the New York Times website for any interesting articles pertaining to the subject. I landed on a recent article from October 17th entitled, “Two Generals, Still Manuevering”. The article focused on the two prominent generals of the Civil War: Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant.

The exhibit entitled, “Grant and Lee in War and Peace,” has raised skepticism about how Grant and Lee will be depicted in comparison to each other. In this famous picture on the right by Leon Gerome Ferris, General Lee is surrendering to Grant, but this is not evident from just looking at the picture. It will be interesting to see if the new exhibit present’s Lee in the same way- it seems to be a common theme for this scene’s illustration these days.

Yesterday at a teacher training workshop at the Lincoln Cottage in Washington, I discussed Abraham Lincoln’s use of war powers and his approach to civil liberties with a group of K-12 colleagues from the DC and northern Virginia area. We had an excellent exchange at a forum hosted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and funded by the NEH. They still have spaces available for qualified teachers who would like to participate. The program offers a monthly series of workshops on topics related to teaching Lincoln and his legacy. Teachers who prepare related lesson plans receive stipends. For more information, contact Scott Ackerman at Scott_Ackerman@nthp.org. Also, if you’re interested in the question of Lincoln’s approach to civil liberties, we have posted an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely in the House Divided video channel that offers a thoughtful assessment of Lincoln’s civil liberties record.

The New York Times reports that some noted scholars such such as Milton Sernett and Kate Larson have questions about the authenticity of a moving quotation from Harriet Tubman used by Hillary Clinton in her recent speech to the Democratic National Convention.

“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”

It turns out that although many authors and even the Harriet Tubman House in Auburn, NY have used this passage from Tubman, both Sernett and Larson, leading Tubman scholars, doubt its veracity and trace its origins to a twentieth-century children’s book.  A spokesman for Senator Clinton says that from now on she will only use the passage in paraphrase.

While I already mentioned Teaching the Journal of American History in another post, I want to highlight their recent update. Lacy Ford’s article from the June 2008 issue (Reconfiguring the Old South: ‘Solving’ the Problems of Slavery, 1787-1838) is now available for free.  The author provides six interesting exercises that you could use in class. Each exercise has several questions, related primary sources, and suggestions for further reading. Even if you do not use the article, be sure to check out the primary sources that are available. This site also provides free access to several other articles from the Journal of American History, including one on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the Scopes Trial.

No activist of the Underground Railroad served longer or with more distinction than Levi Coffin. Coffin was raised in the Quaker enclave in Guilford County North Carolina, where in 1819-1820 he helped to organized the only documentable UGRR operation beyond the upper South. From then until about 1850, Quakers with the assistance of local African Americans, including at least one slave “Hamilton’s Saul” — who chose to remain enslaved in order to help others to freedom — dispatched fugitives overland with Quaker emigrants to Indiana. Coffin himself moved to Indiana in the 1820s, where he organized another efficient underground organization, which funneled “passengers” north toward Detroit. In the 1840s, Coffin moved again, to Ohio, where he built an effective UGRR in Cincinnati. In all, Coffin, who at the end of his life chronicled his is experiences in a book, his “Reminiscences”, estimated that he had assisted as many as 1,000 escaped slaves to freedom.

Another major Underground figure is David Ruggles, who was born free in Connecticut, and in the 1830s created the UGRR in New York City. Ruggles was a remarkably bold and confrontational man, who repeatedly challenged the authorities in a city where collaboration among slave hunters, police and the courts was tragically rife. Indeed, New York then was far from progressive in its politics, which generally were aligned with the slave-holding South, since the city’s economy depended significantly on Southern trade. The city was a slave hunter’s paradise, where recaptures were tragically common. Ruggles was himself targeted by slave hunters on at least one occasion, and barely escaped. He also received in his home the fugitive Frederick Bailey, whom he sheltered and dispatched to safety in New Bedford, MA: There Bailey changed his name and became the man we know as Frederick Douglass.

George de Baptiste, like Ruggles, embodied the bold personality and deft political skills that characterized many AFRICAN-American leaders of the UGRR. Born free in Virginia, trained as a valet and barber, he was also a successful member of the black middle class of his time. He eventually settled in Madison, IN, where in the 1840s he helped organize an all black UGRR operation which reached into Kentucky, and assisted fugitives northward until it was penetrated and destroyed by pro-slavery agents in the late 1840s. de Baptiste escaped to Detroit, where he helped create the mosty efficient UGRR operation west of the Appalachians.

The three characters I would teach – given very limited time – would be, of course, Harriet Tubman, William Still, and Thomas Garrett. These three people were incredible forces on the UGRR as individuals and as accomplices and colleagues. Harriet Tubman tapped into Thomas Garrett’s and William Still’s extensive and sophisticated UGRR network that encompassed not only Garrett’s home state of Delaware, but Tubman’s Maryland stomping ground, as well as Virginia and North Carolina. Garrett is credited with aiding in the escape of approximately 2700 fugitives over a forty year period to the Civil War. Tubman, 70 or so friends and family from the Eastern Shore of Maryland between 1850 and 1860; and William Still, as Secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee during the 1850s, assisted at least 2000 runaways. Their powerful networks of agents, conductors, and station masters extended all the way from slave territory to Pennsylvania, New York, New England and Canada. There are so many personal stories you can share with your students that involve these three historical figures and the people they helped and interacted with. They also represent a core of an important theme of the UGRR movement – biracial cooperation and mutual support. So discover Thomas Garrett, a Wilmington, DE Quaker, William Still, a free born African American business man and notoriously underrated UGRR in Philadelphia, and of course, Harriet Tubman, formerly enslaved woman whose love of her family and friends moved her to conduct dangerous missions back into slave territory to bring away her loved ones, and who used her great intelligence and skills to perfect and utilize this UGRR network to her great advantage.

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.

Was the Civil War the result of conflict between small militant anti-slavery and pro-slavery groups? The questions is still debated today. To allow your class to join in on the debate, History Now provides a lesson plan for high school level students exploring Militancy in the Abolition Movement. The lesson provides primary source documents to which students respond. A well chosen bank of questions is included. Certainly worth a look!

As a NEH participant in the URR workshop, I want to recognize John Brown’s link to Iowa by pointing out that Brown, on his way east to prepare for Harper’s Ferry, stopped among the Quaker community in Iowa near Springdale. A couple of Quakers from that community, “abandoning their pacifist principals to fight with Brown,” to paraphrase one source, accompanied him and helped to execute the violence at Harper’s Ferry.

Springdale is within eyesight today of Interstate 80, about 55 miles west of the I-80 bridge over the Mississippi River. That Quaker community was the same later to influence the upbringing of Herbert Hoover, born in West Branch, about 6 miles to the west of Springdale. Herbert Hoover Historic Site explains some of Hoover’s Quaker influences, and the site features a meetinghouse from the area used by the Friends. The national park is easily accessible, a little more than a quarter mile from the exit ramp of the interstate, and features Hoover’s birth home, a presidential library, and gravesites.