What Happened to Slaves When their Owners Died?

What Happened to Slaves When their Owners Died?

Students will read slaveowners' wills to see what the death of slaveowners meant to their human property.

Instructional Objectives
Materials, Equipment, and Student Background Required
Historical Background
Procedure
Follow-up, Extension, and Assessment

Instructional Objectives

National History Standards

Standards in Historical Thinking 4: Historical Research Capabilities
Students should be able to

A. formulate historical questions from encounters with historical documents.
C. interrogate historical data by uncovering the social, political, and economic context in which it was created; testing the data source for its credibility, authority, authenticity, internal consistency and completeness; and detecting and evaluating bias, distortion, and propaganda by omission, suppression, or invention of facts.

Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction

A. Students should be able to demonstrate understanding of how the North and South differed and how politics and ideologies led to the Civil War by identifying and explaining the economic, social, and cultural differences between the North and the South.

Virginia Standards of Learning

C/T8.4 The student will use search strategies to retrieve electronic information.
11.7 Students will develop skills in historical analysis, including the ability to analyze documents, records, and data, formulate historical questions and defend findings based on inquiry and interpretation, and communicate findings orally, in brief analytical essays, and in a comprehensive paper.

National Council for the Social Studies

II. Time, Continuity, and Change
- a. Students will systematically employ processes of critical historical inquiry to reconstruct and reinterpret the past, such as using a variety of sources and checking their credibility, validating and weighing evidence for claims, and searching for causality.
V. Individuals, Groups, and Institutions
- a. Students will apply concepts such as role, status, and social class in describing the connections and interactions of individuals, groups, and institutions in society.
- b. Students will analyze group and institutional influences on people, events, and elements of culture in both historical and contemporary settings.

Materials, setting, and student background required

This class can be done in a networked computer laboratory or in a traditional classroom setting.
Networked lab: There should be a computer for each team of 2-4 students. Print and copy the Student Worksheet (it will be two pages) in advance, and have the URL that the students should go to posted in a prominent place: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/. . . . Students should have the Student Worksheet and a pen or pencil with them while they work at their computers. Students should be familiar with how a browser works, including how to navigate between two open browser windows.
Traditional Classroom: Print and copy the following in advance:

Student Worksheet
Last Will and Testament of Mary M. Burton
Will and Testament of Mary G. Calhoon
Will and Testament of Henry Kenneday
Will and Testament of Robert Christian

Historical Background

Slaves were legally defined as property: slaves could be bought, sold, rented, and bequeathed in wills. Occasionally, slaveowners freed their slaves in their wills. George Washington not only freed his slaves, he also established a fund to provide financial support to the former slaves in their old age. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson's slaves were sold shortly after he died in order to provide money to pay off some of Jefferson's outstanding debts.

Procedure

Brief students on background material as necessary.
Put students in groups of two to three students. Handout worksheets, and, if you are in a computer lab, assign each group to a computer. Make sure that the URL is posted in a prominent place: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/. . . .
Students should follow the instructions on the worksheet, reading the four wills and filling out the chart.
Teachers may choose to have students read one will instead of all four, assigning each will to a quarter of the class. Doing so could make the whole-group discussion more interesting, since not all students will have read the same material.
When the students have finished the worksheet to your satisfaction, recovene the class as a whole group, and go over the worksheet together.
Discussion questions:

Can you think of any reasons why slaveowners would not want to free their slaves after they died?
In addition to learning about what happened to slaves when their owners died, what else have you learned about antebellum America? (Hint: what about relations between husbands and wives? parents and children?)
Did anything in the wills change the way you thought about slavery?

Follow-up, Assessment, and Extensions

1. Write a one-act play that takes place in the slave quarters of a dying slaveowner. The slaves will discuss what they think might happen to them.
2. Explore the following sections of the archive and write an essay or research paper on slavery that combines the material you have found with secondary sources on slavery.
Slavery and Politics newspaper transcriptions
African Americans/Race Relations newspaper transcriptions
Slaveowner census

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This material was developed by Alice Carter for the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education.