the national debate over slavery objective objective: students will identify the causes for the...
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The National Debate over Slavery
Objective
• Objective:
• Students will identify the causes for the unraveling of the compromise of 1850.
I. The Fugitive Slave Act
• Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act– The law had a number of flaws:
• Alleged fugitives were not entitled to trial by a jury or a speedy trial
• They could not testify on their own behalf• Law enforcement officials made more money for
convictions of alleged fugitives than for those who were found not guilty. <- Problem with this?
I. The Fugitive Slave Act
• Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act– Some northerners felt that the law was
immoral, especially since it was often used as a way to capture free blacks!
• Some organized “vigilance committees” to protect African-Americans
• Others worked for the passage of STATE personal liberty laws.
– What were these laws?
I. The Fugitive Slave Act
• The Southern Reaction– Southerners approved of the Fugitive Slave
Act. – However, they were enraged by the personal
liberty laws. • Why?
II. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin– Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist living in
Maine, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. – It was a scathing moral critique of slavery
• It focused specifically on the damage slavery did to black families
II. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin– It was commercial hit in the North and it was
very successful in making many northerners abolitionists.
• Lincoln: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
II. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin– Southerners were not pleased!– They argued that it was a fictional account of
slavery that greatly exaggerated the facts– They also noted that Stowe had only visited a
plantation once– Some Southerners responded with anti-Uncle
Tom literature.
III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• The Advance of Slavery– Most of the land that comprised the Louisiana
Purchase was still unorganized territory.– Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, wanted these
western lands settled. • He also wanted a railroad (one subsidized by the
government) to go through Chicago, not a southern city.
III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• The Compromise dissipates– Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act
to not only help settle the West, but to convince Southerners to allow the railroad to go through Chicago
III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• The Compromise dissipates– The Act called for dividing the Purchase into
two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. – Both territories would eventually become
states. Their slave status would be determined by popular sovereignty.
– Douglas assumed that Kansas would be a slave state, and that Nebraska would a free state.
III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• The Northern Reaction– The South loved the Act, as it expanded the territory
in which slavery could exist.– Northerners were outraged- much more outraged
than Douglas expected. Many more northerners had become abolitionists by this time!
– Though the Act became law in 1854, the North was embittered, and some northerners became determined to stop the advance of slavery by any means necessary.
IV. Review
• What caused the Compromise of 1850 to unravel?
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