Imagine you are a young boy growing up during the era of the Civil War. You are a slave, the property of the owner of a large cotton plantation. You live in the slave quarters.
Read each question and select the choice you think is correct. Be sure to read the explantion for the answer you choose so you can learn more. Keep guessing and learning until you find the correct answer!
In what kind of house would you and your family live?
a simple one-room cabin
Yes! Built of logs or wood, these cabins would have a front door and even a window or two, though usually the windows were just openings in the walls covered over during rain. Fathers usually made the furniture and utensils in a slave household, and mothers and daughters would have made quilts for bedcovers.
a two-story brick row house
Try again! These types of houses were found in cities.
a house built of sod and mud
Try again! This would have been a frontier house.
a tenement
Try again! These apartments are where the urban poor lived.
What would your workday look like?
getting up at dawn, picking cotton, toting water, cleaning shoes, being a “play child”
Yes! A slave child’s workday started before the sun rose with the sound of a horn or a bell. Children might work in the fields or in the “Big House” (the slaveowner’s house). Sometimes children were assigned to one of the slaveowner’s children as a hand servant or “play child.”
having breakfast, going to school, coming home, playing
Try again! There’s not much work here. Children from wealthy families might experience this type of day.
going with your father to hunt for food, playing with your friends, helping feed the animals
Try again! This was more like the typical day for a Native American boy with a balance of work and play.
getting up at dawn, making breakfast, cleaning the fireplaces, dusting, serving dinner
Try again! This would have been the workday for a young city girl working as a domestic servant.
What kinds of games would you have played?
handball, stickball, horseshoes
Yes! Slave children also liked to wrestle, jump rope, and explore.
lacrosse, football, and hide-and-seek
Try again! These games were played by Native American boys.
jacks, rolling hoops, swinging
Try again! These games were played by children living in cities.
mumblety-peg, wrestling games, jumping
Try again! These were popular with children living on the prairie. (In mumblety-peg, they would pull a knife out of the ground with their teeth!)
After the war, what kind of education would you have received?
attending classes at a freedman’s school
Yes! After the Civil War, northern teachers (both black and white) came to the South to open schools for the freed slaves. These schools taught many former slaves, from children to adults, how to read and write.
none – there was no time for school with all the work
Try again! Immigrant children tended to miss out on education because working was too important
homeschooling by parents or a neighbor, or attending a one-room schoolhouse
Try again! This is what pioneer children did until schools could be built and a teacher hired.
enough reading, writing, dancing, and drawing to be “cultivated”
Try again! Upper-class girls were taught this way so they would make good wives and mothers.
[Adapted from source]