It seems like more has happened in the 24 years covered in chapter 7 of Henretta then the rest of the readings wi have had so far. The war has just ended and the country is trying to get things back into order and establish things they didn't have to worry about in the past. Almost every state sat down and wrote their new and individual state's constitution. The biggest problem with this was most likely establishing rules for slavery, how the remaining territories were going to be set up, and if/how school systems were going to be organized.
The Continental Congress made the desicion for dividing up the remaining land. The area South of the Ohio River was organized by Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. They did this because they thought the barrier of the Appilachian Mountains would make it almost impossible for Congress to deal with them. The Northwest Territory (land North of the Ohio River) would be divided into 6 states; Ohio, Indianna, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Why didn't the Northern states get to decide how the NW Territory was divided like the Southern states did? Could this be one of the contributing factors to the Civil War (jealousy)? Each state was then divided into townships of 36 square miles. This made it a whole lot easier to keep track of property boundaries.
Each individual state was able to write their own slavery laws. Yet Congress wrote a law that in 20 years the slave trade would stop. How were slave owners and newly aquired landowners feeling about this? They could keep on buying them for another twenty years but if they needed anymore after that their slaves would have to procreate or they would have to trade "used" slaves with another owner.
There were a few of the existing states that decided to make education mandatory. For example, Pennsylvania introduced an extensive elementary school system. After elementary school, most states didn't have any form of public education unless you went to a private school.
If no one went to school after elementary how was it possible for all the new universities established during or after the Great Awakening, like Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Brown, have kept in business with not many people going through a complete education and even some that do going off to fight in the Revolution? You would think these universities wouldn't be formally established until about the 1780's.
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I think the law outlawing the slave trade was just meant to pacify those who were calling out for an end to slavery because realistically, that would have little effect on the continuance of slavery. As we discussed in class, slavery was self-sustaining, especially with the laws stating that any child with amount of "slave blood" in their body would be a slave as well. It seems it would only effect those who would want to buy slaves in 20 years which caused people to focus more on professions that would not require slaves.
The idea of education at the begining of our country is interesting. What Tai was saying about the universities being founded on certain religion, and now religion being so seperated from our public school system. Yet it's still a controversial topic in politics.
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