Download THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Teacher's Guide
All material in this program is the exclusive property of the copyright holder.
Copying, transmitting, or reproducing in
any form or by any means without prior
written permission from the copyright
holder is prohibited (Title 17, U.S. Code
Sections 501 and 506).
©1992 Delphi Productions
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
TIME: 14 minutes
INTRODUCTION
This program provides a took at the life of Abraham Lincoln
using historical photographs and "on location" video imagery. The biography of Lincoln is a relating of the history of
the times. The descriptions of his personal and political life
help us to understand what it meant to live in America in the
first half of the 19th century.
The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln was designed for
use with students in Grades 5 and above and contains a
great deal of historical information. It stands alone as a brief
biography of Lincoln, or it can be used to correlate or
supplement a study of the Civil War period.
SUGGESTED INSTRUCTIONAL PROCEDURE
A. TEACHER PREPARATION
1. Preview the video and read over the information in
this guide and on the blackline masters.
2.
Students should have access to a map of the
eastern half of the United States as it looked at
the onset of the Civil War.
3.
Duplicate the blackline masters you intend to
use.
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B. TOPICS PRESENTED IN THIS PROGRAM
1. Lincoln's early life on the frontier of Kentucky and
Indiana.
2. Lincoln's life in Illinois as a shopkeeper, lawyer,
and politician.
3. Lincoln's presidency.
4. Slavery and the Civil War: The Gettysburg
Address and the Thirteenth Amendment.
5. The end of the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination.
C. STUDENT OBJECTIVES
After viewing this program and participating in the
lesson activities, students should be able to do the
following:
Describe Lincoln's early life and early nineteenth
century frontier life.
Relate some of Lincoln's personal life. Discuss
events leading up to the Civil War.
Describe Lincoln's acts as president during the
Civil War.
D. INTRODUCING THE LESSON
1. Introduce the program with a brief description of
what will be presented: Abraham Lincoln's life as
a child, young man, and political figure during
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the first six decades of the nineteenth century.
2.
3.
Ask a few thought-provoking questions. For
example:
a.
In what various ways do you imagine
Lincoln's life on the early American frontier
would be different from your life today? How
would it be similar?
b.
What qualities set Lincoln apart from the
average man of his era?
It is recommended that Blackline Master 1, Key
Names, be handed out before viewing the program. It contains a list of important names which
should be given special attention. After viewing
the video, students can also be assigned the
homework task of writing one paragraph descriptions of the names on this list.
E. PRESENT THE VIDEO-Time: 14 minutes F.
FOLLOW-UP DISCUSSION
Review Blackline Master 1, Key Names, to stimulate
discussion of the video.
G. FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES
1.
Distribute Blackline Master 2, The Union and
Confederacy Map. Have the students label the
states shown on this map of the eastern half of
the United States. Ask them to use the two letter
postal abbreviations. If necessary, provide them
with a list of these abbreviations. Have them
shade the Confederate states.
You might want to point out that California and -3-
Oregon were also states at that time, and West
Virginia became a state in 1863 and Nevada in
1864.
2.
Distribute Blackline Master 3, The Gettysburg
Address. Read it aloud in class. Either discuss
the questions on this master with the students or
have them write their answers on the back of the
paper.
3.
Distribute Blackline Master 4, Word Find. The
directions are self-explanatory.
4.
Have a student read the Thirteenth Amendment
to the Constitution. Does this amendment guarantee the ex-slaves all the rights held by other
Americans? Is segregation implied in the Thirteenth Amendment?
5.
Distribute Blackline Master 5, ESSAY
QUESTIONS. Ask the students to write short
essays responding to the two questions presented. Collect them and/or have the students
read them to the class.
H. ANSWER KEY
Blackline Master 1, Key Names
Answers will vary but should contain some of the
following:
1. Mary Todd - Lincoln's wife and mother of four sons.
2. U. S. Senate - Upper Congressional house; two
members elected from each state. Lincoln ran
for the Senate but was defeated.
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3.
U. S. House of Representatives - Lower Congressional house; number of representatives
from each state determined by population. Lincoln elected in 1846.
4. Stephen Douglas - Lincoln ran against him for the
Senate. They debated on the extension of
slavery into free territory. He was Lincoln's
opponent for the presidency.
5.
Robert E. Lee - Commander-in-Chief of the
Confederate forces.
6.
Emancipation Proclamation - Lincoln declared
that all slaves in states, or parts of states, that
were in rebellion on January 1,1863, would be
free.
7. Ulysses S. Grant - Union General
8.
Battle of Gettysburg - Worst battle of the war in
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
9.
Appomatox, Virginia - Lee surrendered to Grant
at Appomatox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.
10.
The Thirteenth Amendement - made slavery
illegal.
11.
John Wilkes Booth - assassinated Lincoln in
Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14,1865.
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SCRIPT OF VIDEO NARRATION
Abraham Lincoln, America's 16th president, was born on
February 12, 1809 in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky.
His parents were poor settlers on the early frontier of our
country. As a young child he sometimes played in the woods
and creeks when he wasn't helping his father feed the
family.
The Lincolns were farmers and, like most Americans of that
time, lived off what they could grow and shoot.
Abe and his older sister Sarah attended school in a one
room windowless schoolhouse a few miles from their home.
Here Abe learned the basics of reading, writing, and
arithmetic: skills his parents had never learned.
When he was only seven, his father decided to move to
Indiana, which had just joined the Union as our 19th state.
Here they built a new log cabin and started another farm.
Two years later Abe's mother died, and after that time his
eleven-year-old sister took her mother's place—cooking,
cleaning, and spinning wool.
His father remarried a young widow, and the Lincoln family
grew to eight members. They all lived together in the oneroom house.
By now Abe was growing tall, and he helped his father with
the com and splitting wooden fence rails.
As a teenager, a lot of work was required of Abe, and, in
addition, he had to educate himself. He loved to read and
spent his evenings with the few books he could get his
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hands on.
By the time he was 18, Abe got a job bringing a boat full of
cargo down the Mississippi River to New Orleans—a
journey of well over one thousand miles.
Although he had undoubtedly seen slaves before, it was in
New Orleans that he first became aware of the huge
business of buying and selling black human beings.
A few more years passed by, and his family moved again—
this time to the prairies of Illinois. By now Abe was old
enough to strike out on his own. He settled in the small
woodland community of New Salem, Illinois.
This thriving little town had a blacksmith shop, a cooperage
where buckets and barrels were made, a tavern, and a few
stores.
At first Abe got a job working in one of these stores. He
joined the New Salem Debating Society and spent a lot of
time studying in order to polish up his country ways.
By the time he was 23, Abe decided to run for election to the
state government. He lost the election but got a big majority
of votes in his own area of the state.
Not succeeding in politics, young Lincoln decided to go into
business. He and a partner opened a general store which
sold all sorts of things the frontier settlers might need.
But it seemed that Abe just wasn't cut out to be a businessman because the store kept losing money, even after they
moved across the street to a bigger building with more
merchandise.
By the time the store closed down for good, Lincoln was
$1,100 in debt—a sum so large it took 15 years to repay.
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By the time he was 25, Abe ran for the state legislature, and
this time he was elected.
While serving as a legislator here at the state capitol,
Lincoln began his study of law.
Three years later found him not only serving a second term
as legislator but also working as a partner in a lawyer's
office located across the street from the capitol.
Lincoln's political successes continued to soar as a leader
of the Illinois Whig party and with re-elections to third and
then fourth terms in the legislature.
In November of 1842, Abraham Lincoln wed Mary Todd,
the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky banker.
Because of his prosperous law practice, the Lincolns were
able to purchase this fine new house in Springfield.
And here, on this street, they raised their four boys: Robert,
Eddie, Willie, and Tad. Over the next 17 years this house
served as their home.
Lincoln's political ambitions continued to rise, and in 1846
he was elected to his first national office, serving in the
House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. Here he
debated the critical issues of slavery and war with Mexico.
As a congressman in Washington, Lincoln could look out
the windows of the capitol building and see pens where
black people were kept chained before being sold in the
south. At that time most of the states north of the capital did
not allow slavery while all of the southern states did allow it.
The slaves were used on the big southern farms which grew
cotton and tobacco. They were treated as the property of
the men who owned the farms and had abso-10-
lutely no rights or freedom. As a congressman, Lincoln
wanted to see slavery done away with, and he felt that if
Congress could keep slavery from spreading it would
probably just fade away.
The issue of slavery was a source of great trouble between
the northern and southern states. Northerners regarded
slavery as a moral evil, and the white southerners saw
slavery as necessary to support their agricultural way of life.
Lincoln considered his two year term in Congress a disappointment because he was not very successful in accomplishing what he wanted—ending slavery and ending the
war with Mexico. He returned to Springfield and to being a
lawyer.
In 1850 his son Eddie died at the age of three. Abe became
very gloomy and tried to forget his sadness by working extra
long hours. His wife didn't leave her room for weeks.
Lincoln ran as a Whig for the U.S. senate in 1855 and lost.
He ran again as a Republican in the 1858 election and
during the political race he carried on debates with the other
candidate, Stephen Douglas. Many people attended these
debates. Douglas was for slavery and Lincoln was against
it. As Lincoln said,
'There is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled
to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of
Independence: the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as a
white man."
Although Lincoln again lost the race for the senate, his
debates with Douglas caused him to become a well-known
national political figure, and two years later Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States.
In 1860 the country had become bitterly divided between
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north and south. Seven southern states had left the Union
four months after Lincoln's election, and more were expected to follow.
Within the month following his inauguration, war had broken out between the states, starting when an army fort in
the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina was bombarded
by rebel forces.
Loyal troops were rushed to Washington D.C. to protect the
capital, which was just across the Potomac River from the
rebel town of Alexandria, Virginia, and little more than 100
miles from the Confederate capital of Richmond.
The north had a population of 22 million and contained most
of the country's factories; whereas the south was basically
agricultural and had a population of 9 million people, of
which nearly 4 million were slaves.
It might seem that the odds against the south were impossible, and yet southerners were great fighters led by brilliant
generals such as Robert E. Lee, and, during the first year
of the Civil War, the Union troops were rarely successful in
beating the rebel armies.
Meanwhile, President and Mrs. Lincoln lost a second son,
Willie, to a bad fever. After his death, Mrs. Lincoln never
fully recovered, and her husband was also overwhelmed
with grief. Now they had only two of their four children left
alive: little Tad, who lived with his parents at the White
House, and his older brother, Robert, who was away at
college.
By the summer after Willie's death, President Lincoln had
decided that freeing the slaves was "a military necessity,
absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union," and
on New Years Day, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation which freed the southern slaves
and which allowed them to join the Union army.
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By the end of the war, more than 180,000 blacks, mostly
emancipated slaves, had served in the Union army.
The Civil War ground on with tremendous loss of life. On
July 1,1863 the worst battle of the war began outside a little
Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. 170,000 troops
engaged in battle, and in the end the rebel forces were
defeated, but the total number of dead was over 43,000.
On November 19 President Lincoln made a short but
famous speech at the battlefield where he was dedicating a
cemetery to those who died at the battle of Gettysburg. In
this speech, known as the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln
said that the men who died in this battle had done so to
preserve our American Democracy...
...to make certain that "those dead shall not have died in
vain...that this Nation under God shall have a new birth of
freedom...and that the government of the people, by the
people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."
After the battle of Gettysburg, the South was soon overrun
by Union troops who destroyed most of what was in their
path.
By April of 1865, the Confederate capital of Richmond had
been captured and laid to ruin. And by the 9th of that month,
the Union General, Ulysses S. Grant, accepted the surrender of the Confederate General, Robert E. Lee, at Appomattox, Virginia.
Six months earlier, Abraham Lincoln had been elected to a
second term as president, and on January 31, 1865 the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United
States, which made slavery illegal, was proposed to Congress.
It finally began to seem to President Lincoln that he could
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start to take life a bit easier.
On Good Friday, April 14, five days after the rebel surrender, Lincoln said to his wife, "I never felt so happy in my life."
That evening after dinner he and Mary went with two friends
to a play at Ford's Theatre near the White House.
As the president sat enjoying the performance, an actor
named John Wilkes Booth slipped into his viewing box...
...and shot him in the head.
The mortally wounded president was taken across the
street to a boarding house and put into a bed. He died there
at 7:22 in the morning at the age of 56, and America had lost
one of its greatest men.
John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators were hunted down
and caught.
A funeral was held for the president in the East Room of the
White House, and the next day his body was carried to the
Capitol dome where thousands of people, both black and
white, filed by the open coffin.
On April 21 a funeral train draped in black carried the
president's body back to his home town of Springfield,
Illinois where it rests today.
And, although he has been gone for well over a century,
Abraham Lincoln remains in the memory of all Americans as
the man who freed the slaves and preserved the Union of
the United States.
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Name_____________________
1
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
KEY NAMES
Directions: Give a brief description of the following
1. Mary Todd
2. U. S. Senate
3. U.S. House of Representatives
4. Stephen Douglas
5. Robert E. Lee
6. Emancipation Proclamation
7. Ulysses S. Grant
8. Battle of Gettysburg
9. Appomatox, Virginia
10. The Thirteenth Amendement
11. John Wilkes Booth
The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln
©1992 Delphi Productions
Abraham Lincoln delivered this short speech on November 19,1863 at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg in
Pennsylvania. The occasion was the dedication of a part of the battlefield as a cemetery for those who had lost their
lives in that Civil War battle.
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived
in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come
to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that
nation might live. It is altogehter fitting and proper that we should do this.
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this
ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our
poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it
can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to
be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we
here highly resolve that those dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth."
1. What do you think of the speech? Why?
2. Who do you think Lincoln was referring to when he said "...all men are created equal"?
3. What did Lincoln mean when he made the following statements?
a. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that (our) nation, or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
b. ".. .that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."
The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln
©1992 Delphi Productions
The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln
©1992 Delphi Productions
The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln
©1992 Delphi Productions