A Nation Divided
Sponsor: “This podcast is brought to you by funding from the Title IID “Destinations in History” grant through the Office of Educational Technology, Queens.”
Planter: Ha, ha, ha…. I don’t believe in God. I am here to capture innocent Africans and bring them over to South Carolina to work for me on my huge plantation!
Narrator: How much do you pay them?
Planter: Pay them? Ha ha….I whip them, if they don’t do what my overseer says!
Slave: I am soooooo crooked, my back is killing me! My master is soooo mean! He makes me pick cotton for 16 hours a day! While he does nothing just sits and eats cake!
Planter: Well, I love to be the planter I am filthy rich! Great that my skin is white and not brown like the Africans. I am intelligent and know how to read unlike my slaves!”
Slave: So he thinks….
Slave: I am secretly stealing food from the trash! At least, it tastes better than the scraps we have to eat in the field!
Planter: “Get over here! Right now……………….”
Slave: Darling family…..please don’t pity me….It is was all worth it because when I touch the food and take a bite of….their trash….I feel free and alive!
Narrator 1: The Civil War divided many the North and the South, friends, families and even states were torn apart.
Narrator 2: When Abraham Lincoln was elected as president in 1860. Southerners thought the government was becoming too strong. They did not think the government had the right to tell them how they should live. Southerners felt if they stayed in the United States, the North would control them and they wouldn’t be able to have slaves!
Narrator 1: Some southern states decided they had no choice. They decided to secede, or leave, the United States. South Carolina was the first to leave the Union and form a new nation called the Confederate States of America.
The northern states were called the Union. President Lincoln said he would fight to keep the southern states as part of the United States. There were Union forts on Confederate land. The Confederates wanted Union soldiers to leave these forts. In Charleston, South Carolina there was a Union fort called Fort Sumter. The Union soldiers refused to leave this fort, so the Confederates fired cannons at the fort on April 12, l861. This was the beginning of the Civil War!