America’s History: Printed Page 506
| MAKING CONNECTIONS | Recognize the larger developments and continuities within and across chapters by answering these questions. |
ACROSS TIME AND PLACE Ex-Confederates were not the first Americans to engage in violent protest against what they saw as tyrannical government power. Imagine, for example, a conversation between a participant in Shays’s Rebellion and a southern Democrat who participated in the overthrow of a Republican government in his state. How would each describe his grievances? Who would he name as enemies? Compare and contrast the tactics of these and other violent protests against government power in the United States. To what extent did these groups succeed?
VISUAL EVIDENCE Return to the image at the start of this chapter, which shows a celebration in Baltimore after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Note the distinguished African American heroes depicted at the top and the three scenes at the bottom. In the complete version of this popular lithograph, additional images appear on the left and right: black Union soldiers in battle; an African American minister preaching at an independent black church; a teacher and her students in a freedpeople’s school; an African American farmer in a wheat field; and a drawing of a proud black family on their farm with the caption “We till our own fields.” If a freedperson and a former slave owner had seen this image in 1870, how might each have responded? Imagine that an African American family had placed the picture in their home in 1870. How might they have reflected differently, twenty years later, on its significance?