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While not a textbook, I would recommend considering a supplement:

http://www.amazon.com/Eyewitness-America-American-History-Happen/dp/067976724X

Eyewitness to America: 500 Years of American History in the Words of Those Who Saw It Happen Paperback July 28, 1998
by David Colbert (Editor)

Letters and diary entries written by de Las Casas, Columbus, Cartier, John Smith, William Bradford, Cotton Mather, John Adams, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones (a lot of fun for kids to read!), Madison, Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, John Wesley Powell, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and many others.

There is no shaping of the message, since this is American history as seen by the people who lived through it. There is no selection at all for politics and very little selection even for “diversity”. The minority and female entries are for the most part fully justified by the event described and not just tossed in to meet an implied quota.

“Why did that green goose Anderson go into Fort Sumter? Then everything began to go wrong. Now they have intercepted a letter from him . . .”

“He demanded what time I left Boston. I told him, and added that their troops had catched aground in passing the river, and that there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the country all the way up.”

“General Grant began the conversation by saying, ‘I met you once before, General Lee, while we were serving in Mexico.’”

“The Admiral sailed west-southwest, at the rate of ten miles an hour and occasionally twelve . . . He added that it was useless to murmur because he had come in search of the Indies, and was going to continue until he found them with God’s help.”