A Big Issue with Little Resolution

The controversial topic of slavery continued to be a topic of constant debate and change through the nineteenth century.  You have the antislavery North against pro slavery South. Both have strong feelings for what the believe in and both can't seem to permanently compromise on the matter. Some may say that slavery was an "elephant in the room". This phrase is used to describe something that is known but being ignored. So how do we know that slavery was an elephant in the room? That was our job to find out.

As a class, we looked at many events leading up to the civil war. In groups, we made a timeline using the RWT timeline application. We started with the Compromise of 1850. This compromise was a temporary solution to a never ending problem. The Gadsden Purchase that followed in 1853 worried Northern antislavery advocates because they couldn't get to this new territory as fast as the southerners could to settle it and vote it as either a free or slave state. As a result, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed which allowed Northerners to get to these new territories and settle them by railroad easier than the South could. They wanted to settle and get enough people there to vote them as salve states. The result, "Bleeding Kansas" The Missouri Compromise no longer is relevant considering it isn't being put into affect. The solutions still didn't do the trick.  To follow, Dred Scott thinks he should be free because he and his wife live in a free state, but court rules he is a slave and slaves aren't free or citizens. There was still so much controversy and no solution. This is shown when Charles Sumner makes a fiery anti slavery speech and is later attacked with a cane by Preston Brooks. This proves that slavery is still an ongoing unsolved issue that cause civilized men to resort to violence to show what they believe.

My timeline of events that I created is below.

The information used to create this timeline has been linked above in the text and from the class notes slides I linked to word "class". The images are from Wikipedia, ushistory.org, causesofthecivilwar.wikispaces.com, gadsdenpurchase.com, pbs.org, and licoln.lib.niu.edu  .Also used was the "America: Pathways to Present" textbook.