Week 12 · Chapter

Chapter 12 — Slavery & the Sectional Crisis

U.S. History to 1877 Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~65–75 minutes · Objectives 1, 3, 6, and 7 · Read it first this week, before the lecture and the slide deck.

In plain language

This week covers the 1850s, when the fight over slavery in the western territories split the country. Slavery was a system of forced labor held together by violence, and the cotton economy (the Southern economy built on cotton that enslaved people grew) made it worth more every year to the people who profited from it. Congress tried to settle the question with the Compromise of 1850 (a set of laws about slavery and the new western lands), then handed it to settlers' votes under popular sovereignty (letting a territory's settlers decide), and in 1857 the Supreme Court said Congress could not bar slavery from a territory at all. You will read four dated documents: a law, a second law, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and a Supreme Court decision. Each time you will ask who decided, and who was never asked.

Why you already care about this

Picture a small hearing room in a Northern city in the early 1850s. A federal official sits at a table. A man from a slave state has brought a sworn paper saying that the Black woman in front of the table escaped from him. She has lived in the city for years. She knows her neighbors, her church, and her work. The law says she may not tell the official any of it.

You may have been in a room where someone else's paperwork decided your case: a landlord's lease, a school's file, an office that would not hear your side. Now raise the stakes to the highest they can go. The question in that room was whether a person would leave it free or enslaved, and the person with the most at stake was the one person not allowed to speak.

In 1850 Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which set up rooms like that one. In 1854 Congress let settlers in Kansas vote on slavery. In 1855 Frederick Douglass published his second autobiography. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford. You will read all four, one short pinned passage at a time.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

explain the cotton economy and the domestic slave trade, and name slavery as a system of violence;
describe how enslaved people resisted and kept their families and faith;
source My Bondage and Freedom as Douglass's own account and argument;
read what the Compromise of 1850 did, slave trade and all;
close-read the Fugitive Slave Act for the testimony it barred;
explain the Kansas-Nebraska Act, popular sovereignty, and Bleeding Kansas;
tell the Missouri Compromise line from popular sovereignty;
state Dred Scott v. Sandford's holding from the record;
order the territories set and match each fragment to its document.

Hook to keep: in every measure this week, ask who decided and who was never asked.

Carry this sentence with you: who decides — Congress by a line versus settlers by a vote.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 3 showed how colonial law made slavery hereditary and racial. Week 6 read the Constitution's slavery clauses, including the clause on people who escaped from one state to another. Week 9 taught the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the line Congress drew. Week 10 read a dictated narrative and the abolitionists, Black abolitionists among them. Week 11 followed the war with Mexico to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848).
This week: the cotton economy and the domestic slave trade; the lives and resistance of enslaved people; Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and Freedom; the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act; the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas; and Dred Scott v. Sandford.
How they connect: the land added in 1848 reopened the question Week 9 thought was settled. Who would decide whether slavery spread into it?
Where we're going next: Week 13, The Coming of the Civil War, follows the crisis to secession and war.

Two earlier ideas carry this week. From Week 3, hereditary racial slavery: enslavement for life, passed from mother to child and tied to African descent by law. The laws of the 1850s protected that same system. From Week 9, the Missouri Compromise line: the line at 36 degrees 30 minutes that Congress drew in 1820. This chapter keeps asking whether that line still held. This is a heavy week, in subject and in documents, and the course is built to be supportive of it. Take one section at a time.

1. Follow the cotton: the economy and the domestic slave trade

This section describes the buying and selling of human beings and the separation of families. Read it at your own pace.

Start with a shirt. Before the shirt there was cloth, and before the cloth there was a bale of raw cotton on a dock. Follow that bale back, and you reach a field in Mississippi or Alabama, and the people who picked it under an overseer's eye.

The cotton economy is the economy of the Southern states built on cotton grown by enslaved people. By the 1850s cotton grown by enslaved people was the country's leading export. That made slavery worth more every year to the people who held others in it.

The cotton states needed more labor than they had. The answer enslavers chose was the domestic slave trade: the buying and selling of enslaved people inside the United States. It forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of people from the Upper South, states such as Virginia and Maryland, to the cotton states farther south and west. Historians revise the exact count, so the course says it in words. What the trade did to families does not need a number. Husbands were sold away from wives, and children from parents.

Worked example — the system named plainly. You list what held slavery together, from the record.

Law: hereditary racial slavery made a child enslaved because the mother was, as Week 3 showed.
Labor: enslaved people grew the cotton the country sold abroad.
Sale: the domestic slave trade moved people south, and the threat of sale hung over every family.
Force: enslavers used the whip and other punishments to make people work. Douglass's book of 1855 describes whippings he saw and suffered.

In words: slavery was not a set of bad masters and good ones. It was a system held together by law, sale, and violence, and the people who profited from it built a whole economy on it.

Douglass's book also reprints, at its end, part of a speech he gave in Rochester in 1852 about this trade. He describes traders driving enslaved men, women, and children down the roads to the slave market at New Orleans. That is a paraphrase, not a quotation, and the speech is his testimony about a trade he had seen.

Misconception check. Students often think the trade in human beings ended around 1808. That is tempting, because Week 6 showed the Constitution protected the Atlantic slave trade only until 1808. But the domestic slave trade inside the country kept growing as cotton spread. The cure is to name which trade you mean: the trade across the ocean, or the trade inside the country.

Honesty note: the scale of the domestic slave trade is taught in words because historians revise the figures. No count is keyed in this course.

2. Recognize resistance: the lives of enslaved people

Think about a person who works for someone they cannot quit, under rules they did not write. They might work slowly on purpose. They might break a tool. They might keep a part of their life, a family, a song, a prayer, that the boss cannot touch. Now remember that for enslaved people the boss also owned their bodies and their children.

Enslaved people resisted slavery every day. Resistance is the ways enslaved people opposed their enslavement, from working slowly and running away to keeping families and faith alive and, rarely, open revolt.

Worked example — the forms of resistance. You sort them from the everyday to the rare.

Everyday: slowing the pace of work, breaking tools, pretending not to understand an order.
Family: marrying and raising children, even though no law protected those families.
Faith: worshiping in their own way, sometimes in secret, and drawing hope from it.
Flight: running away, sometimes for a few days and sometimes to the North.
Revolt: armed uprising, which was rare because the odds against it were so great.

In words: resistance was not one act. It ran through ordinary days as well as through the famous escapes.

Enslaved people also left testimony. Some wrote their own life stories; some told theirs to others. That testimony is primary evidence of their experience, read with the same four moves as any source.

Misconception check. Students often think enslaved people accepted slavery because large revolts were rare. That is tempting, because revolts are what textbooks headline. But resistance took many forms, and most of it was meant to stay hidden from enslavers. The cure is to look for resistance in work, family, faith, and flight, not only in revolt.

Pause and choose one. (a) Write two sentences on why a family that no law protected was itself a form of resistance. (b) Write two sentences on why most resistance left few written traces.

3. Read Douglass in his own words: My Bondage and Freedom

Imagine the difference between a friend telling your life story to a reporter and you writing it yourself. In the first, someone else chooses the words. In the second, every word is yours, and so is every choice about what to leave out.

My Bondage and Freedom is Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, published in 1855 after his Narrative of 1845. An autobiography is an account of a person's own life written by that person, so the words on the page are the author's own. The Avalon Project keeps the text. It is the week's Primary Source Workshop document.

Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland and escaped in 1838. By 1855 he was an antislavery speaker and writer living in Rochester, New York. He was, in his own pages, a writer making an argument from his own life.

Worked example — the four moves on My Bondage and Freedom. You take the moves in order.

Sourcing: Frederick Douglass is the author; it is an autobiography, published in 1855; the Avalon Project keeps it. Douglass wrote it himself. That sets it apart from Week 10's dictated narrative, where Sojourner Truth told her life and Olive Gilbert wrote it down. The book does carry an editor's preface and an introduction by other writers, so you name whose pages you are reading.
Contextualization: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was the law of the land, and people who had escaped slavery lived in danger of capture.
Close reading: as a boy in Baltimore, Douglass heard the man who held him forbid his wife to keep teaching him to read. Douglass drew his own lesson from it: "knowledge unfits a child to be a slave." Learning to read became, for him, the road out.
Close reading, continued: the second pinned fragment records his freedom being bought. "The sum paid for my freedom was one hundred and fifty pounds sterling." Friends in Britain raised the money, and his papers of manumission, the formal written release from slavery, are dated 1846. Douglass writes that the purchase exempted him from the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850. He adds that some antislavery friends objected, because paying seemed to admit that a person could be property.
What he leaves out: Douglass refuses to say how he escaped in 1838, so that no one who helped him could be punished. A silence can be a choice, and here it protected people.
Corroboration: the Fugitive Slave Act, read later in this chapter, shows why his freedom had to be bought.

The reading in one plain sentence: Douglass's book shows how he, in his own words and in 1855, explained what slavery took from him and how he understood the road to freedom; it is evidence of his experience and his argument, not of every enslaved person's life.

Misconception check. Students often treat Douglass's book like Truth's narrative, as a life told through someone else's pen. That is tempting, because both are life stories by people who escaped slavery. But Douglass wrote his autobiography himself, and he chose every word, including what to leave out. The cure is sourcing: ask who put the words on the page.

The pinned fragment repeats the language of the man who enslaved him. The course quotes it only to read the document, and Douglass's point is that the lesson ran the other way.

4. Read the Compromise of 1850 row by row

Picture a family with five arguments going at once. Someone proposes one big deal to settle all five. The deal fails. Then someone else splits it into five separate votes, and each one passes with a different group of supporters.

That is roughly how the Compromise of 1850 passed. Week 11 showed how the war with Mexico added huge western lands. California asked to enter the Union as a free state, and that reopened the fight. Henry Clay of Kentucky proposed one package of resolutions. The National Archives says the Senate turned the package down, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois passed the parts as separate bills, five statutes in all, in September 1850.

Worked example — the territories set's row, part by part. You read what the Compromise of 1850 did.

California: admitted as a free state.
The new territories: slavery left to popular sovereignty.
The District of Columbia: an end to the slave trade (not slavery) there.
Texas: a boundary settlement.
A stricter fugitive slave law.

In words: the Compromise gave something to each side, and its fifth part, the fugitive slave law, would soon do more to anger the North than any of the others.

Misconception check. Students often think the Compromise of 1850 ended slavery in the District of Columbia. That is tempting, because "an end to the slave trade" and "an end to slavery" sound alike. But the Compromise ended the slave trade there, and slavery in the capital went on. The cure is to read the row word by word: trade, not slavery.

5. Close-read the Fugitive Slave Act: a hearing without testimony

Think about a hearing where only one side may speak. The other side stands in the room and listens to its fate. No one would call that fair in any setting you know.

The Fugitive Slave Act is the federal law of 1850 that set up hearings to return people claimed as escaped from slavery, barred the person claimed from testifying, and punished anyone who helped an escape. It is a federal statute: a law passed by Congress and signed by the President. The Avalon Project keeps the text. Its closing line records that it was approved in September 1850.

Worked example — the hearing as a procedure. You walk the steps the act sets out, as a fresh illustrative case in a Northern county.

A claimant, or his agent, arrives with a sworn paper from his home state saying that a named person owes him labor and escaped.
The person is seized, with a warrant or without one, and brought before a judge or a federal commissioner, an official a federal court appointed to hear these claims.
The commissioner hears the case in a summary hearing: a quick hearing with no jury and few of a trial's protections.
The person claimed tries to speak. The act forbids it: "In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence".
If the commissioner grants the certificate, the claimant may take the person south. The act paid the commissioner $10 when he granted it and $5 when he refused it.
Anyone who helped the person escape or hid them faced a fine of up to $1,000 and up to 6 months in prison.

In words: the law put the full weight of the federal government behind the claimant and silenced the one person whose freedom was at stake. Every step in the procedure above comes from the act's own text, read as a paraphrase.

The reading in one plain sentence: the act shows the hearing Congress wrote into law in 1850, one in which the person claimed could not speak in evidence; it is evidence of the law's design, not of how the people it endangered answered it.

Corroborate it with Douglass. He writes that only the purchase of his freedom put him beyond this law's reach. Free Black people in the North, born free or long free, lived with the same danger, because the hearing would not hear them.

Misconception check. Students often think a person claimed under the act got a trial where they could tell their side. That is tempting, because "hearing" sounds like a fair process. But the act barred the testimony of the person claimed. The cure is close reading: find who may speak, and who may not.

Pause and choose one. (a) Write two sentences on why the difference between the $10 fee and the $5 fee matters to a close reading. (b) Write two sentences on why barring one person's testimony changes what a hearing is.

6. Read the Kansas-Nebraska Act: popular sovereignty on the ballot

Picture a settler in a new territory walking to a polling place in a log store. On the ballot is a question that will shape the territory for good: will slavery be legal here? Now look at the line of voters. Ask who is in it and who is not.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act is the federal law of 1854 that created the Kansas and Nebraska territories, repealed the Missouri Compromise line, and left slavery there to popular sovereignty. The National Archives keeps it. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced the bill. Watch the spelling: Stephen A. Douglas the senator is a different person from Frederick Douglass the writer.

Popular sovereignty is the rule that the settlers of a territory decide by their own vote whether slavery will be legal there, rather than Congress deciding for them.

Worked example — reading the act and the ballot. You take the act's text in three parts.

The rule: the pinned fragment says each territory, when it became a state, "shall be received into the Union with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of the admission". That is popular sovereignty in the law's own words.
The repeal: the act declared the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery north of the line void, a paraphrase of its text.
The voters: the act gave the vote at the first election to free white men over 21 who lived in the territory. That is a paraphrase too. The "people" who would decide did not include women, Black people, or the Native nations living there.

The act's text also said treaties with the Native nations in the territories were to be kept, a reminder that the land was already home to nations.

Then came the rush. Settlers for and against slavery poured into Kansas, each side hoping to win the first election. The fighting that followed earned the name Bleeding Kansas: the violence in Kansas Territory after 1854, when settlers for and against slavery fought to control the territory's government. Opponents of the act helped found the Republican Party, which Week 13 takes up.

Misconception check. Students often think popular sovereignty meant everyone in the territory voted. That is tempting, because the phrase sounds like "the people decide". But the act gave the vote at the first election to free white men only. The cure is to read who the act counted as voters.

7. Keep two rules apart: the line versus the vote

Imagine two ways to decide where a new building may go. In the first, the city council draws a zoning map once. In the second, each neighborhood holds a vote. The results can look alike on a map, but the people deciding are completely different.

Week 9 taught the first kind of rule. The Missouri Compromise line is the line at 36 degrees 30 minutes, drawn by Congress in 1820, north of which slavery was barred in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. The Kansas-Nebraska Act replaced it with the second kind of rule, popular sovereignty, where settlers vote.

Worked example — how long the line held. You check an archive's statement against the chronology.

The Missouri Compromise is dated 1820.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the line in 1854.
The line's life: 1854 − 1820 = 34 years.
Corroboration: the National Archives says the line held for 34 years. The two agree.

In words: for 34 years Congress decided by a line; in 1854 Congress handed the decision to settlers' votes.

Misconception check. Students often think the Missouri Compromise line and popular sovereignty were the same rule. That is tempting, because both dealt with slavery in the territories. But the line was drawn by Congress, and popular sovereignty left the question to settlers' votes. The cure is one question for any measure: who decides, Congress or the settlers?

8. State Dred Scott's holding from the record

Picture a family that has lived for years in a place where the law says no one may be enslaved. Then they are taken back to a place where slavery is legal. They go to court and argue that their years in free territory made them free. Courts had ruled that way before.

That family was real. Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in St. Louis in 1846. Their enslaver, an army surgeon, had held them at Fort Snelling, in territory where slavery was barred. Their daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, were named in the suit too. The case went through the courts for 11 years and reached the Supreme Court.

Dred Scott v. Sandford is the Supreme Court decision of 1857 that held that Black Americans were not citizens under the Constitution and that Congress had no authority to bar slavery from a federal territory. A Supreme Court decision is a ruling of the nation's highest court together with the written opinion that explains it. The National Archives keeps it.

Worked example — the four moves on the decision. You take the moves in order.

Sourcing: Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the majority opinion, the written explanation that speaks for most of the Court's judges, in 1857; the National Archives keeps the transcript.
Contextualization: the Kansas-Nebraska Act had already repealed the line three years earlier, and Kansas was bleeding.
Close reading: the opinion says that Black Americans "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution". The Court's majority wrote Black Americans, enslaved and free, out of citizenship.
Close reading, continued: the opinion also held that Congress had no authority to bar slavery from a federal territory, so the Court called the Missouri Compromise's ban void.
Corroboration: set Douglass beside Taney. In his Rochester speech of 1852, reprinted in his book, Douglass told his audience that he stood outside the nation's celebration of independence. That is a paraphrase. Five years later the Court's majority made that exclusion the law.

The reading in one plain sentence: the decision shows what the Court's majority held in 1857; it is evidence of the law the Court laid down, not of what Black Americans or the country's opponents of slavery accepted.

Misconception check. Students often think Dred Scott was a ruling about one man only. That is tempting, because the case carries one man's name. But the Court held that Black Americans were not citizens under the Constitution and that Congress could not bar slavery from any federal territory. The cure is to read the holding, not the case name.

Caveat: contextualization places the ruling in its decade; it never excuses the ruling. The course states the holding as the record gives it.

9. Order the territories set and match the fragments

Picture four index cards on a desk, each with a year and a measure. Before you argue about any of them, you put them in order. Then you can see the story they tell together.

The territories set is the course's four measures on slavery in the western territories, from the Missouri Compromise to Dred Scott v. Sandford, each with its year and what it did.

Worked example — ordering the territories set. You order the four measures and measure the gaps.

Order, earliest to latest: 1820 (the Missouri Compromise), 1850 (the Compromise of 1850), 1854 (the Kansas-Nebraska Act), and 1857 (Dred Scott v. Sandford).
Gaps: 1850 − 1820 = 30 years; 1854 − 1850 = 4 years; 1857 − 1854 = 3 years.
Span: 1857 − 1820 = 37 years.
Check: the three gaps add back to the span, 30 + 4 + 3 = 37 years.
From Week 11: the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) to the Compromise of 1850 is 1850 − 1848 = 2 years.

Worked example — fragments to documents. You match each pinned fragment to its document.

"In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence" comes from D26, the Fugitive Slave Act, 1850.
"shall be received into the Union with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of the admission" comes from D27, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854.
"knowledge unfits a child to be a slave." and "The sum paid for my freedom was one hundred and fifty pounds sterling." come from D28, My Bondage and Freedom, 1855.
"are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution" comes from D29, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857.
Count: 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 = 5 fragments from 4 documents.

Worked example — who decided. You read one question down the territories set.

1820: Congress decided, by drawing a line.
1850: the settlers of the new territories would decide, by popular sovereignty.
1854: the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska would decide, and the line was repealed.
1857: the Court said Congress had no authority to bar slavery from a federal territory at all.

In words: in 37 years the decision moved from Congress, to settlers, to a Court that took the choice away from Congress. Each compromise was built to hold the Union together, and none of them settled the question. Week 13 follows what happened next.

Misconception check. Students often think the Missouri Compromise line still stood in 1857. That is tempting, because the line had lasted so long. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed it in 1854, and Dred Scott then said Congress never had the power to draw it. The cure is to put the four years in order before you reason about any one of them.

Key terms

Cotton economy — the economy of the Southern states built on cotton grown by enslaved people, which by the 1850s made cotton the country's leading export. (first used: 1. Follow the cotton: the economy and the domestic slave trade)
Domestic slave trade — the buying and selling of enslaved people inside the United States, which forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of people from the Upper South to the cotton states and separated families. (first used: 1. Follow the cotton: the economy and the domestic slave trade)
Resistance — the ways enslaved people opposed their enslavement, from working slowly and running away to keeping families and faith alive and, rarely, open revolt. (first used: 2. Recognize resistance: the lives of enslaved people)
My Bondage and Freedom — Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, published in 1855 after his Narrative of 1845. (first used: 3. Read Douglass in his own words: My Bondage and Freedom)
Autobiography — an account of a person's own life written by that person, so the words on the page are the author's own. (first used: 3. Read Douglass in his own words: My Bondage and Freedom)
Manumission — the formal act by which an enslaver released a person from slavery, recorded in written papers. (first used: 3. Read Douglass in his own words: My Bondage and Freedom)
Compromise of 1850 — the set of laws of 1850 that admitted California as a free state, left slavery in the new territories to popular sovereignty, ended the slave trade but not slavery in the District of Columbia, settled a Texas boundary, and passed a stricter fugitive slave law. (first used: 4. Read the Compromise of 1850 row by row)
Fugitive Slave Act — the federal law of 1850 that set up hearings to return people claimed as escaped from slavery, barred the person claimed from testifying, and punished anyone who helped an escape. (first used: 5. Close-read the Fugitive Slave Act: a hearing without testimony)
Federal statute — a law passed by Congress and signed by the President. (first used: 5. Close-read the Fugitive Slave Act: a hearing without testimony)
Federal commissioner — an official appointed by a federal court who, under the law of 1850, heard claims that a person had escaped from slavery. (first used: 5. Close-read the Fugitive Slave Act: a hearing without testimony)
Summary hearing — a quick hearing decided by an official without a jury and with few of the protections of a full trial. (first used: 5. Close-read the Fugitive Slave Act: a hearing without testimony)
Kansas-Nebraska Act — the federal law of 1854 that created the Kansas and Nebraska territories, repealed the Missouri Compromise line, and left slavery there to popular sovereignty. (first used: 6. Read the Kansas-Nebraska Act: popular sovereignty on the ballot)
Popular sovereignty — the rule that the settlers of a territory decide by their own vote whether slavery will be legal there, rather than Congress deciding for them. (first used: 6. Read the Kansas-Nebraska Act: popular sovereignty on the ballot)
Bleeding Kansas — the violence in Kansas Territory after 1854, when settlers for and against slavery fought to control the territory's government. (first used: 6. Read the Kansas-Nebraska Act: popular sovereignty on the ballot)
Dred Scott v. Sandford — the Supreme Court decision of 1857 that held that Black Americans were not citizens under the Constitution and that Congress had no authority to bar slavery from a federal territory. (first used: 8. State Dred Scott's holding from the record)
Supreme Court decision — a ruling of the nation's highest court together with the written opinion that explains it. (first used: 8. State Dred Scott's holding from the record)
Majority opinion — the written explanation of a court's ruling that speaks for most of its judges. (first used: 8. State Dred Scott's holding from the record)
Territories set — the course's four measures on slavery in the western territories, from the Missouri Compromise to Dred Scott v. Sandford, each with its year and what it did. (first used: 9. Order the territories set and match the fragments)

Summary

Cotton grown by enslaved people was the country's leading export by the 1850s.
The domestic slave trade moved enslaved people south and tore families apart.
Enslaved people resisted through work, family, faith, flight, and, rarely, revolt.
Douglass wrote My Bondage and Freedom (1855) himself; read him as author and witness.
The Compromise of 1850 ended the slave trade, not slavery, in the District of Columbia.
The Fugitive Slave Act (1850) barred the testimony of the person claimed.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) repealed the line and left slavery to popular sovereignty.
A line drawn by Congress is not popular sovereignty.
Dred Scott (1857) reached every Black American and every federal territory, not one man.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative county opens a courthouse in its 12th year, a jail in its 19th year, and a records office in its 31st year. How many years passed from the courthouse to the jail, and from the jail to the records office? Check that the two gaps add back to the span.
An illustrative state rule says each new town will vote on whether to allow a tannery. Is that a line drawn by the state or a choice left to the town's voters? Explain in two sentences.
A classmate writes that a set of laws "ended slavery in the capital" because it "ended the slave trade in the capital". Rewrite the sentence so it says only what the second phrase shows.
An illustrative town's hearing rules let a landlord submit a sworn paper but bar the tenant from speaking. Name the step a close reader would flag, and explain why in one sentence.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

Courthouse to jail: 19 − 12 = 7 years. Jail to records office: 31 − 19 = 12 years. The span is 31 − 12 = 19 years, and 7 + 12 = 19, so the gaps add back. Name the two points you measure between, as you did with the territories set.
It is a choice left to each town's voters, the shape of popular sovereignty. A single map drawn once by the state, by contrast, would be the shape of the Missouri Compromise line.
Write it as: the laws ended the slave trade in the capital. Ending a trade is not ending slavery itself, which is the Compromise of 1850's trap.
Flag the rule that bars the tenant from speaking, because a hearing that hears only one side decides the case before it begins, as the Fugitive Slave Act's bar on testimony did.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Next week you apply one rule, read the cause a document's own authors named, to South Carolina's convention.

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