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Week 12 · Module overview

Week 12 — Slavery & the Sectional Crisis

U.S. History to 1877 Free sample edition

Why this matters

A future lawyer asking who may speak in a hearing and a social-work student listening to people whose stories were once ruled out of evidence both meet this week's question: who decided, and who was never asked?

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.

  • Already covered: Week 3's hereditary racial slavery, Week 9's Missouri Compromise line, and Week 10's dictated narrative.
  • This week: cotton, the slave trade, resistance, Douglass, the Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska, and Dred Scott.
  • How they connect: the land added in 1848 reopened the question of who decides about slavery.
  • Where we're going next: Week 13, The Coming of the Civil War.

Focus

How did slavery's expansion break the compromises that held the Union together between 1850 and 1857?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] tell the Missouri Compromise line from popular sovereignty
  • [ ] source My Bondage and Freedom as Douglass's own account
  • [ ] state Dred Scott's holding from the record

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 12 (~65–75 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
  2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes).
  3. Work the practice set (15–25 minutes).
  4. Do the Primary Source Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  5. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: for any measure, say who decided, Congress or the settlers.

You've got this

Take it one section at a time, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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