WASHINGTON – Teachers who have helped their students grasp the key dates, places, events, and people in Civil War history now have the chance to flesh out one of the period’s most prominent individuals, Abraham Lincoln. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which administers President Lincoln’s Cottage, American University graduate students, and the National Park Service’s Teaching with Historic Places program worked together to create the new online lesson plan President Lincoln’s Cottage: A Retreat, which uses the White House resident’s second home as a foundation on which to construct a portrait of him. You can reach this lesson plan and others from http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/twhp/.

In President Lincoln’s Cottage, Lincoln appears as a husband and father as well as a national leader. Students glimpse him spending quality time with his family by taking a carriage ride with his wife and playing checkers with his son. A reading from the journal of poet Walt Whitman indicates Lincoln’s humility, for the poet observes the simplicity of the president’s clothing and carriage. While Whitman states directly that Lincoln “looks about as ordinary in attire, etc., as the commonest man,” readers learn without being told that the president, who returns Whitman’s bows as he passes the poet on his way to or from the White House, does not consider himself above common men. Just as Whitman detects an underlying sorrow in Lincoln’s gaze, students sense, in the lesson’s third reading, the president’s burdened state, as he describes hearing of a Union loss in battle and vowing to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

In addition to readings, the lesson provides background information; a discussion prompt to draw students into the lesson; maps showing the commute between the White House and Lincoln’s retreat; historic images; and activities, such as analyzing a debated issue in current events, that make the lesson relevant to students or make real for them the challenges that confronted America’s government over the issue of emancipation. Teachers can find online not only this lesson but also guidelines for the effective use of any of the Teaching with Historic Places lesson plans.

President Lincoln’s Cottage is the 138th plan in this series, in producing which the National Park Service uses the National Register of Historic Places to enrich traditional classroom instruction in history, social studies, civics, and other subjects. The lessons are indexed by states, historic themes, time periods, learning skills, and history and social studies standards to help educators use them effectively. The National Park Service invites teachers to work with this lesson plan focused on the importance of Abraham Lincoln’s family retreat at the Soldiers’ Home in Washington, DC. In doing so, they will expand their students’ knowledge of Lincoln’s life and improve their understanding of how he intermingled his public and private activities during the Civil War.

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