GRADE 4 SOCIAL STUDIES
LITERACY TASK
This week we will be working on the literacy task assigned to us by PGCPS. This task will have use research Abraham Lincoln and his actions during the Civil War through two texts and a video. We will then create an essay that explains how the authors used reason and evidence to support the points that they make about Lincoln's leadership characteristics as he served our country.
:
Here is the prompt:
Today you
will research information about President Abraham Lincoln. You will read
an excerpt called “Maryland Divided” adapted from My World Social
Studies Text and then you will watch the video “Abraham Lincoln.”
Finally, you will read an excerpt from “Lincoln: A Photobiography” by
Russell Freedman. As you review these sources, you will gather information from
different authors about President Lincoln’s leadership characteristics so
you can write an essay.
SOURCES:
1.
“Maryland Divided”: Adapted from My World Social Studies Text
2. Video:
“Abraham Lincoln
3.
Excerpt from Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman
You have
read two excerpts and watched one video about President Abraham Lincoln. You
read “Maryland Divided” that explained about how President Lincoln
handled many difficulties in the Civil War. The video, “Abraham Lincoln”
explained about President Lincoln’s life and accomplishments, and in the
excerpt from “Lincoln: A Photobiography” by Russell Freedman, the author
explained how President Lincoln was able to issue the Emancipation Proclamation
and pass the 13th Amendment.
Write an
essay explaining how each author uses reasons and evidence to support the
points made in the texts about President Lincoln’s leadership characteristics as
he served our country. Support your essay with information from all three
sources.
Here are some useful background videos.
Here's a useful video about the Battle of Antietam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYdzni6rV04
And a final video about the Emancipation Proclamation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwNTwuHAf1M
This one is a bit more boring, but probably less annoying!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh3-9R7Q0OE
Here are the sources you must use...
“Maryland
Divided” Adapted from My World Social Studies Text
The Nation
Divided
In
1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the Unites States. Slavery had
been a major issue in the campaign, and Lincoln wanted to avoid a war over it.
He worried that the issue could destroy the Union (the United States). He
feared that the Union could not survive if it were made of slave states and
free states, or Border States like Maryland.
After the election of 1860, 11 Southern states left the Union. They formed a
new nation called the Confederate States of America. The Confederate States
believed that they had the right to decide certain matters for themselves, and
especially the right to continue slavery. They did not want the national
government to force them to end slavery. Some people in Maryland agreed with
them. But Maryland stayed in the Union.
The Civil War
in Maryland
Lincoln’s worst fears came true in April 1861. The Civil War began. As a border
state, Maryland could not avoid the war. Just a week after the war began,
people who supported the Confederates attacked Union soldiers in Baltimore.
Twelve people died in what was called the Baltimore Riot.
For four years, armies marched across the state. Seven major battles were
fought in Maryland with one of the bloodiest battles of the war happening just
outside of Sharpsburg Maryland in 1862. There Confederate and Union
armies fought at the Battle of Antietam and more than 23,000 soldiers were
either wounded or killed.
After
Antietam, President Lincoln took an important step to ending slavery. On
1863, he presented the Emancipation Proclamation. Emancipation means the
act of making someone free. It was supposed to free enslaved people in
the Confederate states. But many slave owners kept their workers enslaved.
The war was difficult for everyone. Most Maryland soldiers fought for the Union
army, but there were thousands that fought for the Confederates. Families
were split in their loyalties and brothers often fought brothers. At
home, some women helped to farm and others sewed uniforms or cared for the
wounded. The proclamation did not free enslaved Marylanders. During
the war, many had run away to freedom. Some African Americans fought in the
Union army. Then, in November 1864, Maryland lawmakers decided to write a
new constitution. It made slavery against the law in the state. The Union won
the war in April 1865. The United States remained one nation.
Slavery was ended.
A Terrible
Loss for The Nation
Friday evening,
April 14, 1865, President Lincoln and his wife, Mary, attend a play at Ford’s
Theater. During the play, the audience was surprised to hear a gunshot. This
was followed by Mary Lincoln’s screams. President Lincoln had been shot!
Lincoln was
assassinated, or murdered for political reasons by John Wilkes-Booth, a
26-year-old actor who supported the Confederacy. Booth had not worked alone,
and Lincoln was not the only target. The whole group of conspirators was
captured, tried, and punished by death by a military court.
In December of
1865, the United States government passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution. This amendment made slavery illegal in all states.
Reconstruction
After President
Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson became president.
President Johnson wanted to carry out Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction,
the rebuilding and healing of the country. However, Johnson lacked Lincoln’s
skill at dealing with people. He and Congress fought fiercely.
Adapted
from My World Social Studies Texts
Excerpt from Lincoln:
A Photobiography by Russell Freedman
GRADE 4
Excerpt from Chapter
called “Emancipation” pp.85-91
The war had become an
endless nightmare of bloodshed and bungling generals. Lincoln doubted if the
Union could survive without bold and drastic measures. By the summer of 1862,
he had worked out a plan that would hold the loyal slave states in the Union,
while striking at the enemies of the Union.
On July 22, 1862, he
revealed his plan to his cabinet. He had decided, he told them, that
emancipation was “a military necessity,
absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union.” For that reason, he
intended to pass a proclamation freeing all the slaves in rebel states that had
not returned to the Union by January 1, 1863. The proclamation would be aimed
at the Confederate South only. In the loyal Border States, he would continue to
push for gradual compensated emancipation.
Some cabinet members
warned that the country wasn’t ready to accept emancipation. But most of them
nodded their approval, and in in any case, Lincoln had made up his mind. He did
listen to the objection of William H. Seward, his secretary of state. If
Lincoln published his proclamation now, Seward argued, when Union armies had
just been defeated in Virginia, it would seem like an act of desperation, “the
last shriek on our retreat.” The president must wait until the Union had won a
decisive military victory in the East. Then he could issue his proclamation
from a position of strength. Lincoln agreed. For the time being, he filed the
document away in his desk.
A month later, in the
war’s second battle at Bull Run, Union forces commanded by General John Pope
suffered another humiliating defeat. “We are whipped again,” Lincoln moaned. He
feared now that the war was lost. Rebel troops under Robert E. Lee were driving
north. Early in September, Lee invaded Maryland and advanced toward
Pennsylvania.
Lincoln again turned
to General George McClellan- Who else do I have? he asked- and ordered him to
repel the invasion. The two armies met at Antietam Creek in Maryland on September
17 in the bloodiest single engagement of the war. Lee was forced to retreat
back to Virginia. But McClellan, cautious as ever, held his position and
failed to pursue the defeated rebel army. It wasn’t the decisive victory
Lincoln had hoped for, but it would have to do.
On September 22, Lincoln read the final wording of his Emancipation
Proclamation to his cabinet. If the rebels did not return to the Union by
January 1, the president would free ”thenceforward and forever” all the slaves
everywhere in the Confederacy. Emancipation would become a Union war objective.
As Union armies smashed their way into rebel territory, they would annihilate
slavery once and for all.
…
From the chapter called:
“This Dreadful War” p.112-113
“Lincoln regarded the
election as a mandate to push forward with his emancipation program. For months
he had been urging Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that would
outlaw slavery everywhere in America, not just in the rebel South, but in the
loyal border states as well. Lincoln knew that his Emancipation Proclamation, a
wartime measure, could be overturned at any time by the courts, by Congress
itself, or by a future president. A constitutional amendment would get rid of
slavery permanently.
As the winter of 1864
began, Lincoln put tremendous pressure on congressmen who opposed the
amendment. The final vote came on January 31, 1865, when a cheering House of
Representatives approved the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery in the
United States. Lincoln hailed the vote as a “great moral victory.” William
Lloyd Garrison, the Boston abolitionist who had often criticized Lincoln, now
called him “presidential chain-breaker for millions of the oppressed.”
A month later, on March
4, Lincoln stood before the Capitol and took his oath of office a second time.
The pressures of the war showed clearly in the president’s face. His features,
a friend noted, were “haggard with care, tempest tossed and weatherbeaten.”
Lincoln had thought long
and deeply about the horrors of the war, trying to understand why the nation
had been swept up into such violence, destruction, and death. At first the
issue had seemed to be the salvation of the Union, but, in the end, slavery had
become the issue. The war had demonstrated that the Union could survive only if
it were all free.”
