Susie King Taylor, born 1848, wrote a book in 1902 documenting her time spent enrolled as a laundress with the Union’s 1st South Carolina Volunteers, later named 33rd regiment of the United States Colored Troops, during the Civil War.  Documenting the American South, an online resource at the University of North Carolina, has her entire book online.

The book makes great use of primary sources, such as the General Order No. 1 of Lt. Colonel C.T. Trowbridge, commander of the regiment.

Taylor’s account is remarkably vivid outlining the struggles of African American Union soldiers fighting in the South.  She described how “men and even women would sneer and molest them whenever they met them” while her regiment’s “brave men risked life and limb” to assist the citizens of Charleston, S.C. after the 1865 Confederate retreat and subsequent burning of the city.

This a great online primary resource for anyone interested in the life of African American soldiers during the Civil War. Camp life, battles, occupation, and officer descriptions are all intrinsically linked together in Taylor’s candid narrative of one of the definitive moments in our country’s history.

When Delia Locke and her husband moved to northern California in 1855, she started a diary that she continued to write in until her death in 1922. Thanks to the University of the Pacific, her diary entries between 1855 and 1879 are available online. Locke not only recorded detailed observations about daily life, but she also commented on major political events. Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election was “good news,” as Locke noted on November 16, 1860. Four years later she still supported Lincoln. Even though she could not vote, she had strong opinions about the candidates. While Lincoln “[was] the representative of freedom,” Locke believed that Democrat George McClellan represented “slavery” and led a political “party which [was] composed of traitors at heart.” The University of the Pacific also has other interesting digital projects to explore, including “John Muir Journals,” John Muir Photographs, and several collections related to Japanese-American Internment Camps.

Confederate John Jacob Omenhausser, who was captured in 1864 and spent about a year at a Union prison camp in Maryland, filled a sketchbook with over sixty paintings of camp life. The University of Maryland does not have all of Omenhausser’s paintings, but this one is the largest. Omenhausser, who served with the 46th Virginia Infantry, moved to Richmond after the war and worked as a candy maker. He had two children and later died in 1877. The University of Maryland has a number of other interesting digital collections available, including the “Sterling Family Papers” – which I highlighted in a previous post.

HarpWeek has an online collection of political cartoons from 14 presidential elections between the years 1860-1912.  These cartoons provide a visual insight into the climate surrounding the Election of 1860, and its core issues.  Some of the cartoons require a lot of prior historical knowledge, while others can be understood with some basic analysis.  HarpWeek has convienently provided an analysis and explanation of each cartoon.  There are other resources as well for the Election of 1860, including an overview of the historical context and a timeline of important events.  Any of these political cartoons would be beneficial to a classroom discussion of this crucial election.  This webpage provides a useful guide to using editorial cartoons in the classroom.

The Virginia Military Institute has a number of interesting digital collections related to the Civil War era, including one that focuses on the school’s involvement in John Brown’s execution. After Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, VMI Superintendent Francis H. Smith wrote Virginia Governor Henry Wise and offered to send some of the cadets to Charles Town, Virginia to provide extra security for the execution. After the cadets arrived in late November 1859, their commanding officer reminded them that he “expected…[everyone] to abstain from impropriety which could by possibility impair the standing of the corps.” This collection includes Superintendent Smith’s letters to Gov. Wise, Smith’s report on the deployment, orders issued to the cadets, and eyewitness accounts from VMI Prof. Thomas J. Jackson and John T. L. Preston.

Lieutenant Cornelius C. Platter’s diary (Nov. 1864 – April 1865), which is available from the Digital Library of Georgia, provides an account of his service with the 81st Ohio Infantry Volunteers as they marched through Georgia and the Carolinas with General William T. Sherman. This diary offers an interesting perspective on life as an officer throughout this campaign. “We are entirely cut off from communication with the north and are an isolated command,” as Platter wrote on November 13, 1864. One can view the entire diary at once or select a specific section through the table of contents. The project also includes a collection of all the images from George Barnard’s Photographic Views of the Sherman Campaign (1866).

James McPherson writes in Battle Cry of Freedom (1989) that “On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government” (p. 78). Yet that one exception –the fugitive slave law– was a principal cause of the coming Civil War and potentially changes one’s view of the war’s meaning. White southerners were repeatedly infuriated by signs of northern resistance to the fugitive slave law. Abolitionists even taunted them by dubbing their efforts to help runaways an “Underground Railroad.” There was essentially a low-grade border war between North and South over this issue that lasted more than a decade and drove the conflict as much as the crisis over the western territories. Not everybody, not even McPherson, sees the impact of the Underground Railroad as looming this large during the antebellum period, but most of us at the House Divided Project do. That is why the first digital classroom we created was about the Underground Railroad. Partly funded by the NEH, this site offers a host of resources, including historic documents, images, interviews with leading scholars, Google Earth field trips, dozens of K-12 lesson plans and many more tools for the classroom. Especially since this is Black History Month, I hope readers of this blog post will use this opportunity to check out or reexamine these resources and post comments below offering feedback. Everything in the House Divided Project is still in what we are calling a draft edition –all can be fixed, improved or changed as we move toward a public launch during the Civil War 150th commemoration (2011-15).

“Westbrook Seminary: Educating Women” is an interesting digital exhibit available through Maine Memory Network, which is managed by the Maine Historical Society. One can read a student’s diary (1843-1844) as well as learn more about several students who attended Westbrook Seminary throughout the 19th century.  Check out all of the digital exhibits on Maine Memory Network here (including “Debates Over Suffrage,” “Hannibal Hamlin of Paris Hill,” and “Irish Immigrants in Nineteenth Century Maine” )

Written by Kaye Passmore and Amy Trenkle for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Picturing Lincoln is another Picturing America lesson plan. Using art as a medium to teach, students are asked to look at a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and make assessments. Later, students read a short biography of the president before exercising their creative skills in the forms of both poetry and artwork. The lesson plan is suggested for grades six through eight.

While the lesson plan offers an imaginative way for students to learn, one of the suggested extended activities, the interactive image assessment tool, allows students to become active learners. By clicking on various parts of Alexander Gardner’s February 5, 1865 photograph, students learn a fact before being encouraged to jot down any notes or questions they might have. While the activity is meant to be worked individually (with students emailing or printing out their responses), depending on individual class needs it could easily be adapted to be completed in small groups or as a whole.

The University of Iowa’s Digital Library contains a number of different digital projects, including “Iowa Counties Historic Atlases.” One can find almost 100 county atlases published between the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Each county atlas, such as one for Des Moines county, offers different county maps, city maps, a wide variety of illustrations, and historical sketches.