Week 13 · Chapter

Chapter 13 — The Coming of the Civil War

U.S. History to 1877 Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~65–75 minutes · Objectives 1, 4, and 7 · Read it first this week, before the lecture and the slide deck.

In plain language

This week covers the four years from 1858 to 1861, when the fight over slavery's spread broke the Union apart. A new party, the Republicans (a party formed to stop slavery from spreading west), won the presidency in 1860. Seven slave states then claimed the right of secession (a state voting itself out of the Union) before the new President even took office. You will read two dated documents: South Carolina's own statement of why it left, and Abraham Lincoln's first speech as President. Each time you will ask one question: whose words name the cause?

Why you already care about this

Picture a telegraph office in a small border-state town late in 1860. The operator's key starts clicking. He copies a dispatch letter by letter: a convention in Charleston has voted South Carolina out of the United States. By supper the news has reached a farmhouse at the edge of town. One brother says the Union is finished. The other says it can be saved. Their mother asks the question nobody at the table can answer: why did they do it?

You have probably been in an argument where everyone guessed at someone else's reasons. A friend quits a job, and three people give three different explanations. The fastest way to settle it is to read what the friend wrote in the resignation letter. History works the same way. When people leave something, they often write down why.

South Carolina's convention did write it down, in 1860. Lincoln answered in his inaugural address of 1861. In April 1861 Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and the war began. This chapter walks you from the debates of 1858 to that harbor, one dated document at a time.

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

explain why the Whig Party fell apart and what the new Republican Party stood for;
describe what Lincoln and Douglas argued about in 1858;
explain how John Brown's raid hardened both sections;
explain why the election of 1860 led the Deep South to secede;
source South Carolina's declaration and state the cause its convention named;
sort a claim that shows what a source says from one that goes beyond it;
close-read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address for what he promised about slavery;
tell the causes of the Revolution from the causes of the Civil War;
order the week's years and match each pinned fragment to its document.

Hook to keep: let the people who acted name their own reasons, then check them.

Carry this sentence with you: the cause in their words — not a guess.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 4 read the Stamp Act Congress declarations of 1765 on taxes and consent. Week 5 read the Declaration of Independence. Week 9 taught the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Week 12 followed the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857.
This week: the collapse of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republicans; the Lincoln–Douglas debates; John Brown's raid; the election of 1860; South Carolina's declaration of causes; secession; Lincoln's First Inaugural Address; and the attack on Fort Sumter.
How they connect: every compromise of Week 12 failed to settle who would decide about slavery in the West. This week the question moved from Congress and the courts to the ballot box, and then to the states themselves.
Where we're going next: Week 14, The Civil War, follows the war that began at Fort Sumter.

Two earlier ideas carry this week. From Week 12, popular sovereignty: the rule that the settlers of a territory decide by their own vote whether slavery will be legal there. Stephen A. Douglas built his career on it, and you meet him again here. From Week 2 and every week since, the evidence-claims set: the course's illustrative statements, each keyed as showing what a source says or going beyond it. This week you use its items 7 and 8. The subject is heavy, and some quoted documents use the language of their time about enslaved people. The course is built to be supportive as you read them.

1. Watch a party fall and a party rise: the Whigs and the Republicans

Think of a club that has two big factions and one rule: never talk about the one topic that splits them. The rule works for years. Then the topic comes up at every meeting, and the club breaks in two.

The Whig Party was a national political party that was torn apart by slavery in the 1850s, leaving room for a new antislavery-expansion party in the North. Its Northern and Southern members could not agree on slavery in the territories once the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reopened the question. You met that act in Week 12. Its opponents helped found the party that took the Whigs' place.

The Republican Party is the party founded in the 1850s by opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, whose members aimed to stop slavery from spreading into the western territories while saying they would not touch it in the states where it existed. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, a former Whig, joined the Republicans in 1856, according to the ranger at his home in Springfield.

Worked example — what the new party wanted. You sort the Republican position into three parts.

The territories: keep slavery out of the West.
The states where slavery already existed: no plan to touch it there.
Its roots: opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

In words: the Republicans opposed slavery's expansion, which is not the same thing as abolishing slavery.

Misconception check. Students often think the Republicans of 1860 wanted to end slavery everywhere at once. That is tempting, because the party grew out of antislavery anger. But its members aimed to stop slavery's spread into the territories, and its leaders said they would leave slavery alone where it already existed. The cure is one question: expansion or abolition?

2. Hear two candidates argue: the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858

Imagine two candidates for one seat touring a state together, sharing the same stage in seven towns. One speaks for an hour, the other answers for an hour and a half, and the first gets half an hour to reply. Thousands of people stand in the heat to listen.

That is what happened in Illinois in 1858. The Lincoln–Douglas debates were the seven debates of 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, held in seven Illinois towns during their race for a United States Senate seat, in which the two men argued over slavery's future in the territories. The National Park Service lists the towns, from Ottawa, the first, to Alton, the last.

Name trap first: Stephen A. Douglas the senator is not Frederick Douglass the writer from Week 12. Different men, different spellings, opposite sides of the slavery question.

Worked example — the two positions side by side. You set the candidates' answers next to each other.

Slavery in the territories: Lincoln wanted it kept out; Douglas held to popular sovereignty, letting settlers vote on it.
Whom the Declaration of Independence included: Lincoln argued that its promise of equal rights reached Black Americans; Douglas argued that its signers did not mean them.
The result: Lincoln lost the Senate seat, but the debates made him known across the country.

In words: the debates were an argument about slavery and about who belonged in the nation's founding promise.

Misconception check. Students often think Lincoln won the debates of 1858 and went straight to the Senate. That is tempting, because he became President two years later. But Douglas kept the Senate seat. The cure is to keep two results apart: the race Lincoln lost and the fame he gained.

No line from the debates is pinned in this course, so the chapter quotes none of them. The readings page links a ranger's video that reads some of them aloud; listen, and paraphrase what you hear.

3. Weigh John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

Picture a quiet river town where two rivers meet, with a government factory for rifles at its center. One night in 1859 a small band of armed men crosses a bridge in the dark and takes the factory.

John Brown's raid was the attack in 1859 in which the abolitionist John Brown and a small band seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm enslaved people for a rising that never came. In 1856, the state encyclopedia records, Brown and his followers had killed five proslavery men at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. At Harpers Ferry the raiders took the armory and the town, but no rising followed. U.S. Marines stormed the building where Brown held out, and Virginia tried him and hanged him.

The raid failed as a military plan and succeeded as a shock. Northern abolitionists praised Brown as a martyr. White Southerners saw a direct threat to slavery itself, because Brown had tried to put guns in the hands of enslaved people.

Worked example — corroborating two accounts. You compare the two linked accounts of Brown on the readings page.

What both record: the seizure of the armory, the failed rising, the capture, and the hanging.
Where they differ: the state encyclopedia sums up a common judgment of Brown as a murderous fanatic in a good cause, while the Smithsonian's historian calls him a zealot far ahead of his time.
What you keep: the events, which both confirm, apart from each writer's verdict on the man, which is interpretation.

In words: the record of what Brown did is settled; what Brown was is still argued.

Misconception check. Students often think John Brown's raid freed many enslaved people. That is tempting, because Brown planned exactly that. But the rising he hoped for never came, and the raid ended within days. The cure is to read what happened, not what was planned.

Pause and choose one. (a) Write two sentences on why one failed raid could frighten a whole region. (b) Write two sentences on why two careful writers can agree on the events and still judge Brown differently.

4. Count the votes of 1860: Lincoln's election and the split

Picture a school election with four candidates. The biggest group splits its votes between two of them. A third candidate wins every classroom on one floor and none on the other, and that is enough to win.

The election of 1860 was the presidential election in which the Democrats split into Northern and Southern wings and Abraham Lincoln, the Republican, won the presidency without carrying a single Southern state. Northern Democrats ran Stephen A. Douglas on popular sovereignty. Southern Democrats ran a candidate who wanted slavery protected in every federal territory. A fourth party ran on keeping the Union together and setting the slavery question aside.

Worked example — the four choices of 1860. You list each candidate's stand on slavery in the territories.

Lincoln, Republican: keep slavery out of the territories.
Douglas, Northern Democrat: let each territory's settlers decide.
The Southern Democrats' candidate: protect slavery in all the territories.
The fourth party's candidate: set the question aside to save the Union.

In words: every one of the four choices was an answer to the same question about slavery's spread.

A caveat for you: this list shrinks four whole campaigns into one line each. You can use it to compare the stands, but you should not treat it as the full story of any one campaign.

Lincoln won in November 1860. He would not take office until March 1861. In those months the country came apart.

Misconception check. Students often think Lincoln's victory meant most Southerners voted for him. That is tempting, because a winner usually wins everywhere. But Lincoln carried no Southern state; he won because the free states held most of the electoral votes. The cure is to ask where the votes came from, not only who won.

5. Read South Carolina's declaration in its own words

Think about a letter of resignation. It names who is leaving, when, and why. A careful reader checks all three, and then asks what the letter leaves out.

Secession is a state's claim to withdraw from the Union by a vote of its own convention, which South Carolina made first, late in 1860. A declaration of causes is a document in which a seceding state's convention stated, in its own words, the reasons it gave for leaving the Union. South Carolina's is the week's Primary Source Workshop document.

Worked example — the four moves on South Carolina's declaration. You take the moves in order.

Sourcing: its title is the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. It was adopted by the people of South Carolina in convention, in 1860. It is a declaration of causes, and the Avalon Project keeps the text.
Contextualization: Lincoln had won the presidency in November and would take office in March, and the declaration itself looks ahead to that day.
Close reading: the declaration opens with history, from 1765 and 1776 through the peace of 1783 and the Constitution of 1787. It claims the Revolution's right of a people to leave a government. Then it names its cause: "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery".
Close reading, continued: it charges the free states with refusing to return people who had escaped slavery, with calling slavery sinful, and with electing a President whose opinions and purposes were hostile to slavery.
Corroboration: Lincoln's own inaugural address, read later in this chapter, confirms that slavery's spread was the dispute.

The reading in one plain sentence: South Carolina's declaration shows that its convention named slavery as the cause; it does not by itself show what every Confederate soldier believed.

Misconception check. Students often think a declaration of causes is a debate with two sides. That is tempting, because the course presents real debates evenhandedly. But this is a documented fact, not a debate: the convention wrote down its own reasons, and the reason it named was slavery. The cure is to state what the document says plainly before you ask any other question.

The fragment you read calls the free states "non-slaveholding States". The course quotes it only to read the document; in its own voice the course says enslaved people and free states.

6. Test the "states' rights" story against the document

Imagine someone tells you a quarrel was "about principles." You ask which principle. They pause. The honest answer is in the details: what, exactly, did each side want?

A common story says the South left the Union over tariffs, or over states' rights in the abstract. A close reading of South Carolina's declaration tests that story against the convention's own words.

Worked example — reading the right and the duty. You read what the declaration says a state's right and the North's duty were.

The language: the declaration speaks of the rights of states and of a compact the North broke.
The right it defends: the right to hold people as property.
The duty it says the North broke: the duty to return people who escaped slavery, under the Constitution's fugitive clause from Week 6.
What is missing: the word tariff does not appear anywhere in Avalon's text of the declaration.

In words: the declaration uses the language of the rights of states, but the right it names is slavery.

Misconception check. Students often think the war's causes were tariffs or states' rights in the abstract. That is tempting, because people later told the story that way, and the declaration does speak of states' rights. But the secessionists' own words name slavery, and the only right of a state the declaration spells out is the right to hold people as property. The cure is to ask: the right to do what?

An honesty note: this section does not ask you to guess what every white Southerner felt in 1860. It asks you to read what one convention wrote. That is a smaller claim, and a much stronger one.

7. Corroborate and sort two claims: Mississippi and the evidence-claims set

Suppose one witness tells you why a group made a decision. You would want a second witness before you say the whole group thought so. Historians do the same thing with documents.

Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas also issued declarations of causes, and they too name slavery in their own words. Mississippi's declaration, which the Avalon Project also keeps, names slavery in its opening lines. It even refers to John Brown's raid without naming him. That corroborates South Carolina's account of the cause from a second state.

Worked example — sorting two claims. You sort items 7 and 8 of the evidence-claims set.

Item 7: South Carolina's declaration names hostility to slavery as a cause of secession. The declaration's own fragment says so, so this claim shows what the source says.
Item 8: every Southern state seceded for exactly the reasons South Carolina gave. One state's document cannot prove what every state thought, so this claim goes beyond the source.
The count: one claim of each kind, 1 + 1 = 2 claims sorted.

In words: a source can show what its authors said; it cannot by itself prove what everyone else thought.

This is the course's rule of correlation in a source vs. cause in the past at work. A document can show what its authors claimed or what happened together. It cannot, alone, show what caused every other event.

Misconception check. Students often think one strong document settles a question for everyone. That is tempting, because South Carolina's words are so direct. But one convention's words are strong evidence of its own reasons, not proof of every state's. The cure is corroboration: find a second source, then say exactly what the two together show.

8. Read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address: secession in stages

Picture a group chat where people leave one at a time over several months. A few leave the first week. Others wait to see what happens. Some never leave. Calling that "everyone left at once" would get the story wrong.

Secession happened the same way, in stages. South Carolina left first, late in 1860. By the time Lincoln took office in 1861, seven states of the Deep South, the cotton-growing states of the lower South, had seceded. Other slave states, Virginia among them, left only after the fighting began. The border states, the four slave states that stayed in the Union when the war began (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware), never left at all.

Misconception check. Students often think every Southern state seceded at the same time. That is tempting, because maps of the Confederacy show the states together. But South Carolina went first, seven Deep South states left before the inauguration, others left after Fort Sumter, and four slave states stayed. The cure is to ask, for any state, when it left and why.

Now read the new President. The First Inaugural Address is the speech Abraham Lincoln gave on taking office in 1861, in which he said he had no purpose to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed and held that no state could lawfully leave the Union.

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

Sourcing: the author is Abraham Lincoln; the date is 1861, and by the time he spoke seven states had already left. It is an inaugural address, and the Avalon Project keeps the text. Avalon's heading prints the date in capital letters; the text is the speech itself.
Contextualization: the Senate's inaugural page records that Chief Justice Roger B. Taney gave Lincoln the oath. Taney had read the Dred Scott opinion in Week 12.
Close reading: Lincoln says he is quoting one of his own earlier speeches when he declares "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." He also says he has no objection to a proposed amendment, already passed by Congress, that would bar federal interference with slavery in the states.
Close reading, continued: he holds that the Union is perpetual and that no state can lawfully leave it on its own, and he says he will hold the government's forts and property.
His close: "We are not enemies, but friends."
Corroboration: Lincoln says that one section believes slavery is right and should be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and should not be, and he calls that the only substantial dispute. That is a paraphrase, and it agrees with South Carolina about what the fight was over.

The reading in one plain sentence: Lincoln's address shows what the new President promised in 1861, to leave slavery alone where it existed while holding the Union together; it is evidence of his stated policy that day, not of what the war would later become.

Misconception check. Students often think Lincoln promised to abolish slavery when he took office. That is tempting, because his party opposed slavery's spread and the war later ended slavery. But in 1861 he said the opposite, in his own words. The cure is to date the claim: what did he say in 1861, and what changed later?

9. Keep two causes apart and name an open debate

Think of two towns that each broke away from a larger county. Both said they were defending their rights. One objected to a county tax it never voted on. The other objected because the county would no longer protect a practice the rest of the county had turned against. Same words, different causes.

The Revolution and the Civil War are like that. The causes of the Revolution vs. the causes of the Civil War is a pair of causes you keep apart by letting each war's documents name them.

Worked example — two causes, two eras. You set the two declarations side by side.

The Stamp Act Congress declarations (1765), from Week 4: they object to taxes imposed without the colonists' own consent.
South Carolina's declaration (1860): it names hostility to slavery.
The gap: 1860 − 1765 = 95 years.
The twist: South Carolina's declaration retells the history of 1765 and 1776 to borrow the Revolution's authority, but the cause it names is its own.

In words: the Revolution's documents name taxation without consent; the secession documents name slavery.

Misconception check. Students often think the causes of the Revolution and the causes of the Civil War were the same, since both are told as fights over rights. That is tempting, because South Carolina's declaration itself invokes 1776. But the 1765 declarations name taxes without consent, and the 1860 declaration names slavery. The cure is to read each war's own documents for its cause.

Now a question historians still argue about: was the war inevitable? It is a debate historians still have over whether the conflict over slavery's expansion made war certain by 1860 or whether different choices by leaders could have avoided it. The course presents both cases and settles neither.

The case that it was: compromise after compromise had failed, as Week 12 showed. Lincoln himself called slavery's extension the only substantial dispute, and that dispute had no middle left.
The case that it was not: this is contingency, the Week 1 idea that events could have turned out otherwise. The Democrats might not have split in 1860. Congress passed an amendment in 1861 to protect slavery in the states. Someone still had to decide to fire on Fort Sumter.

The cause is not part of this debate. The secessionists named it. The debate is only about whether war had to follow.

Pause and choose one. (a) Write two sentences making the strongest case that war was hard to avoid by 1860. (b) Write two sentences making the strongest case that a different choice in 1860 or 1861 could have changed the outcome.

10. Reach Fort Sumter and order the week's documents

Picture a brick fort on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Early in 1861 a supply ship bound for the fort was fired on and turned back, a ranger at the fort explains. Around the harbor, batteries of the new Confederacy aim at its walls.

Fort Sumter is the federal fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, whose bombardment by Confederate batteries in April 1861 began the Civil War. A ranger at the fort points out that even "who fired the first shot" has several claimants, depending on which source you ask. That is a sourcing lesson too. Week 14 takes up the war itself.

Worked example — ordering the week's years. You order five years from the course chronology and measure the gaps.

Order: 1850 (the Fugitive Slave Act), 1854 (the Kansas-Nebraska Act), 1857 (Dred Scott v. Sandford), 1860 (South Carolina's declaration of causes), and 1861 (Lincoln's First Inaugural Address). Each year is later than the one before it, so the list is in order.
Gaps: 1854 − 1850 = 4 years; 1857 − 1854 = 3 years; 1860 − 1857 = 3 years; 1861 − 1860 = 1 year.
Span: 1861 − 1850 = 11 years. The gaps add back to the span: 4 + 3 + 3 + 1 = 11 years.
A longer view, from Week 9: the Missouri Compromise (1820) to South Carolina's declaration (1860) is 1860 − 1820 = 40 years.

In words: in 11 years the country went from a compromise meant to settle slavery's spread to a war over it.

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

"an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" comes from South Carolina's declaration of causes (1860).
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." comes from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (1861).
"We are not enemies, but friends." also comes from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (1861).
The count: 1 + 2 = 3 fragments from 2 documents.

Misconception check. Students often think South Carolina's declaration answered Lincoln's inaugural address. That is tempting, because the two documents seem to argue with each other. But the declaration came first, in 1860, and the address came in 1861. The cure is to put the years in order before you decide who was answering whom.

Key terms

Whig Party — a national political party that was torn apart by slavery in the 1850s, leaving room for a new antislavery-expansion party in the North. (first used: 1. Watch a party fall and a party rise: the Whigs and the Republicans)
Republican Party — the party founded in the 1850s by opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, whose members aimed to stop slavery from spreading into the western territories while saying they would not touch it in the states where it existed. (first used: 1. Watch a party fall and a party rise: the Whigs and the Republicans)
Lincoln–Douglas debates — the seven debates of 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, held in seven Illinois towns during their race for a United States Senate seat, in which the two men argued over slavery's future in the territories. (first used: 2. Hear two candidates argue: the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858)
John Brown's raid — the attack in 1859 in which the abolitionist John Brown and a small band seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm enslaved people for a rising that never came. (first used: 3. Weigh John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry)
Election of 1860 — the presidential election in which the Democrats split into Northern and Southern wings and Abraham Lincoln, the Republican, won the presidency without carrying a single Southern state. (first used: 4. Count the votes of 1860: Lincoln's election and the split)
Secession — a state's claim to withdraw from the Union by a vote of its own convention, which South Carolina made first, late in 1860. (first used: 5. Read South Carolina's declaration in its own words)
Declaration of causes — a document in which a seceding state's convention stated, in its own words, the reasons it gave for leaving the Union. (first used: 5. Read South Carolina's declaration in its own words)
Deep South — the cotton-growing states of the lower South, seven of which seceded before Abraham Lincoln took office in 1861. (first used: 8. Read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address: secession in stages)
Border states — the four slave states that stayed in the Union when the war began: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. (first used: 8. Read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address: secession in stages)
First Inaugural Address — the speech Abraham Lincoln gave on taking office in 1861, in which he said he had no purpose to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed and held that no state could lawfully leave the Union. (first used: 8. Read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address: secession in stages)
Was the war inevitable — a debate historians still have over whether the conflict over slavery's expansion made war certain by 1860 or whether different choices by leaders could have avoided it. (first used: 9. Keep two causes apart and name an open debate)
Fort Sumter — the federal fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, whose bombardment by Confederate batteries in April 1861 began the Civil War. (first used: 10. Reach Fort Sumter and order the week's documents)

Summary

The Whigs split over slavery; the Republicans rose to stop its spread west.
Lincoln lost the 1858 Senate race to Douglas but became known nationwide.
John Brown's raid of 1859 failed but hardened both sections.
Lincoln won in 1860 without a single Southern state.
South Carolina's declaration (1860) named slavery as its cause, in its own words.
The right the declaration defends is the right to hold people as property.
Secession came in stages; four slave states never left.
Lincoln's address (1861) promised not to touch slavery where it existed.
The Revolution's documents name taxation without consent; the secession documents name slavery.
Whether the war was inevitable is a debate; its cause is not.

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 river town builds a ferry landing in its 6th year, a bridge in its 14th year, and a rail depot in its 23rd year. How many years passed from the landing to the bridge, and from the bridge to the depot? Check that the two gaps add back to the span.
An illustrative club's resignation letter says, "We leave because the club voted to ban our fishing boats from the lake." A member says the group left "over the club's rules in general." Rewrite that sentence so it says only what the letter shows.
An illustrative newspaper editor writes that because one county's farmers signed a petition against a new road, every county in the state opposed the road. Is that claim showing what the petition says or going beyond it? Explain in two sentences.
An illustrative candidate for mayor says, "I will not close the market on the east side, and I will not let a new one open on the west side." Is that a promise about where markets exist now, about where they may spread, or both? Explain in one sentence.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

Landing to bridge: 14 − 6 = 8 years. Bridge to depot: 23 − 14 = 9 years. The span is 23 − 6 = 17 years, and 8 + 9 = 17, so the gaps add back. Name both ends of every gap, as you did with the week's years.
Write it as: the group left because the club voted to ban its fishing boats from the lake. The letter names one rule, so "rules in general" blurs the cause the writers named, which is the states' rights trap of this chapter.
It goes beyond the petition. The petition shows what one county's farmers signed; it cannot show what every other county thought, which is item 8's mistake.
Both: the first half is about where markets exist now, and the second is about where they may spread, the same split between leaving slavery alone where it existed and keeping it out of the territories.

Next up in this module: the lecture, the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Next week you follow how the war that began at Fort Sumter changed from a war for union into a war for freedom.

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