Lesson Plan One: Letters from Home

This lesson plan asks students who have read A Union Tested to analyze the letters of Cimbaline Fike to consider some of the challenges that she faced during the Civil War. After organizing the students into groups of three or four members, ask each group to discuss one of the four following topics. Each group should develop a tentative thesis about their topic and choose at least two pieces of primary source evidence that supports their argument.

Objectives

• to identify the kinds of support that rural women offered for the Union war effort
• to describe the kinds of work that rural women in the North performed after their husbands left to fight in the war
• to evaluate how the Civil War affected gender roles in the rural North
• to assess the political loyalties of people living in western Illinois
• to recognize the sources of conflict that divided members of extended families
• to define the health challenges facing people on the Northern home front and the ways that they dealt with them
• to consider the attitudes toward mental health shared by people of the Civil War era
• to compare and contrast the child-rearing philosophies of parents in the Civil War era - to explain how young children came to understand the Civil War and their parents’ parts in it.

1. Patriotism

• Based upon Cimbaline’s letters, in what ways did northern women express their support for the Union cause?
• What did those kinds of support say about the roles that women held during the Civil War era?
• How unified in its support for the Union cause did the town of Mascoutah seem?
• How did Cimbaline view the men who were reluctant to volunteer or accept their draft calls into the Union military?

2. Gender

• How did the Civil War change the amount or kinds of work that Cimbaline did?
• How do Cimbaline’s views on the use of physical violence influence the way that you previously understood women in the Civil War era?
• How would you describe Cimbaline’s relationships with her extended family members
• What issues were most likely to cause strains upon those relationships?

3. Health

• What were the major health challenges that Cimbaline and other people in Mascoutah faced during the Civil War?
• How was Cimbaline able to address those challenges?
• What insights can you glean from Cimbaline’s letters about the ways that the Civil War influenced the mental and emotional health of people in northern communities?
• Based upon your reading of Henry’s letters, do you think that civilians in the South faced health challenges that were equal to, lesser than, or greater than those in Mascoutah? Why?

4. Parenting and Children

• How would you describe Cimbaline’s parenting philosophy? What evidence can you find that she and Henry may have held different views about the proper way to raise Ellie?
• How did Ellie come to understand the Civil War and her father’s part in it?
• In what ways did Henry try to compensate for his absence from Ellie and Cimbaline?