From Compromise to Conflict: The Crisis Unfolds

1. From Compromise to Conflict:The Crisis Unfolds

2. Classroom Procedures • You and your partner will assume the role of Southerners or Northerners to reach compromises on four historical conflicts that led to the Civil War. • You and your partner will have a twofold goal throughout this activity: • to protect your region’s interest • to avoid civil war

3. Historical Issues that Faced the United States from 1819 to 1860: • The Missouri Compromise • The Compromise of 1850 • The Dred Scott Case • The Crisis of Secession

4. Definitions • compromise~ settlement of differences in which each side gives up something it wants • abolition ~ the movement to stop slavery • abolitionist ~ a person who worked to stop slavery

5. Definitions • gag rule ~ Congress voted in 1836 to table all anti-slavery petitions without reading them • fugitive ~ one who flees or tries to escape Fugitive Slave

6. Definitions • popular sovereignty ~ the right of the people living in a newly organized territory to decide by vote of their territorial legislature whether or not slavery would be permitted there

7. Definitions • secession ~ formal withdrawal from the union • civil war ~ a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

10. Issue 1: The Missouri Compromise • What Really Happened: • Missouri joined the union as a slave state. • Maine entered as a free state. • In this way the balance of power between slave and free states was maintained at 12 states each. • At the same time, Congress drew an imaginary line across Louisiana Territory at latitude 36° 30′. North of this line, slavery was to be forever banned, except in Missouri. South of this line, slaveholding was permitted.

11. Illustrations of slavery published in the Emancipator, September 2, 1839

12. Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion

13. Runaway Slaves

16. Issue 2: Compromise of 1850 • What Really Happened: • California joined the union as a free state. • New Mexico & Utah would be organized as territories open to slavery. • The slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in Washington, D.C. • A stronger fugitive slave law was adopted.

20. Bleeding Kansas

21. Preston Brooks Beating Charles Sumner

22. Portrait of Dred Scott

24. Stephen Douglas (on the left) Abraham Lincoln (on the right) Lincoln-Douglas Debates

25. Portrait of John Brown

27. Bombardment of Fort Sumter

28. Issue 4: Secession • What Really Happened on December 20, 1860: • The first event occurred in Springfield, Illinois, at the home of President-elect Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was asked whether or not he could support some sort of compromise on slavery. His answer was clear. He would not interfere with slavery in the South. He would even support enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. But Lincoln added that there would be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. • On that same day, delegates attending a state convention in Charleston, South Carolina, voted in favor of secession. Six more states soon followed South Carolina’s lead…

29. … and the Civil War began! • Americans fighting Americans. It was the worst war in American history. It was called the Civil War, or the War Between the States, and sometimes brother fought brother and father fought son. • More than 620,000 Americans died. Cities were destroyed, farms burned, homes leveled, and lives were ruined.