Sunday, March 22, 2015

The Election of 1860

The Essential Question posed to our class this week was: ‘How were the results of the Election of 1860 representative of the deep divisions over slavery?’ As an intro to the lesson, our class watched one of John Green’s Crash Course videos on the Election of 1860 (a link can be found at the bottom of this post). This video explained that the growing issue of slavery caused problems like Bleeding Kansas. The country was divided into many sections: Stephen A. Douglas believed that people should be able to vote on whether slavery should exist or not (popular sovereignty), John C. Breckenridge believed that slavery was the priority and all blacks were inferior to whites, Abraham Lincoln was wholly against slavery, and John Bell wanted to keep the Union as is and not change any rules, including those about slavery. Despite all of these candidates, Lincoln ended up winning this huge election, who campaigned for anti-slavery and started the Civil War. As a way to tie this all up, our class went onto the Civil War in Art website and looked at & analyzed five photographs. Our group then made a mini-documentary with Educreations to answer the essential question about the events encompassing the Election of 1860 and. My group's Educreations video is below.


Sources:

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

An Elephant In The Room: Slavery in America


The Essential Question for the Elephant in the Room unit was this: How do we know that the debate over slavery was the 'elephant in the room' for American politics in the early 19th century? A prime example of proving this is The Compromise of 1820 - there were now 11 of both slave and free states, as Missouri was added to the slave states to even out the addition of Maine to the free states. Missouri was going to be over the 'slave line", but the imbalance didn't seem fair to the South- they wanted the same amount of slave states as free states. However, one should note that the south didn't straight out say that this was about slavery, but everyone knew it was. Another reason slavery was the elephant in the room was because of the Compromise of 1850 - California had requested to be a free state, and a 5 part compromise was proposed by Henry Clay, which can be read about here. Another event that indicated slavery was the elephant in the room was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The North wanted to build a transcontinental railroad to make Chicago a huge trading and transportation hub (it'd be the start of the railroad) - Not only would this be a big trading opportunity, it would also make it easier to transport northerner abolitionists to the western frontiers, offsetting the imbalance in pro-slavers and anti-slavers - this in turn negated the Missouri Compromise line. One final point to reinforce slavery as the elephant in the room was Kansas’ bloody civil mini-war. A collection of outbursts so violent, the Kansas territory earned the nickname ‘Bleeding Kansas’ (1856) These bloody spats were started when some pro-slavery looters' actions raised a response from John Brown (the same man who was put to death for leading a raid on Harpers Ferry Federal Armory. He attempted to steal weapons and give them to slaves - for this was martyrized) - he killed some pro-slavery people, resulting in retaliation, and this went back and forth for a while. This fighting was publicly viewed and talked about as territorial disputes, not directly related to slavery. I've included a timeline of major events around this period, which can be seen here: