Paper instructions:
You are a 26 year old slave living in Kentucky near the Tennessee border. Your owner’s wife, a Quaker woman, has always hated slavery and secretly taught you to read and write. When the war started, you begin to keep a diary about events in your county. The diary includes entries on the arrival of Union soldiers in Kentucky, their policy toward slaveowners (like your master) in the first year of the war, especially their treatment of runaways (they call them contrabands), how slaves tried to help the Union soldiers during the war, reaction of slaves to the Confiscation act and the Emancipation Proclamation, your prediction about how the South’s economy will work once slavery finally ends, your first sight of black soldiers fighting for the Union and your hopes and aspirations after slavery finally ends with ratification of the 13th amendment in 1865.
Your diary entry should be five pages, written in the voice of an enslaved woman or man in Kentucky during the Civil War.
