In the first half of chapter 9, the book focuses on slavery. The ideals of the North and South are growing farther apart. The Northern states are starting to gradually stray away from slavery, while new technologies, such as the cotton gin increased the need for slavery in the South. The American Colonialization Society argued that freed slaves should be sent back to Africa. Interestingly enough, Henry Clay believed that if slaves were emancipated, conflicts between the two races would lead to a civil war. Clay obviously predicted a civil war would break out, but should he have predicted that it would have been between the north and the south, instead of the two races? Many slaves did not support the idea of being sent back to Africa. America was their homeland and African Americans were developing a strong cultural society of their own. Although some slaves were being freed, most of them were still considered second class citizens and were not given the same rights as whites. During the Missouri Crisis, southerners were angered by the fact that the Northern majority of the House blocked Missiouri's admission into the union. Southerners stated that slavery was an internal affair that should be left to the states. Do you agree with this statement? Or should the government have control?
The second half of Henretta deals with the arrival of the Second Great Awakening. During the Second Great Awakening the Methodist and Baptist churches gained many more followers. These two churches became very evangelical and reached out to many different cities. One thing that came out of the awakening was the new roles of women. Female education was becoming greater. Women also started to replace men as public-school teachers, and were becoming more recognizable in public life.
10 comments:
It was interesting to ask if he should have predicted a war between the North and the South, but I think the ideas of the time made it easier to believe in a war between races.
I believe that in addition to African Americans not wanting to move back to Africa due to being born in the United States, the African language was consistently being lost due to separation of families and the mix of different African tribes. It was stated in the Henretta book that a number of these Africans were now learning how to speak a broken version of English, and they most likely viewed themselves more as Americans than Africans due to this evolution in their communication process.
we talked about this in discussion, but I don't think there would have been a civil war between the two races. There were plenty of free slaves already in the North and with the exception of Nat Turner they didn't go around killing white people. If the slaves had been emancipated, I don't think there would have been a war between them but it is hard to say. Even if there had been the slaves would have been greatly out numbered.
Once the slaves became free (I know this really didn't happen this way) wouldn't you think someone might have been smart enough to make another compromise? For the North, the slaves would be free. For the South, the male landowning African Americans can vote since there is obviously no more 3/5 compromise.
It is understandable for people to expect a civil war between the races. The slaves had obviously been oppressed by white people and even the freed slaves were not being treated as equal. But the African Americans were not looking to fight right after they were freed, they were looking to develop a free life. The slaves that were already freed in the North had not done much for revolting, they simply got jobs and began their lives and I would expect this to be what most of the freed slaves would have done.
Henry Clay should have predicted a civil war would have broken out between the north and south eventually because of their many different views on issues, most being opposite views entirely. Slavery should be left up to the government because slavery deals with civil rights.
I don't think that there would have been a war between the races. Civil war was more based on principle which could be shared between races. Some blacks disagreed with the idea of being sent back to Africa. Also states shouldn't have such control on such an issue. An issue such as protecting someones constitutional rights should be in the hands of the national gov't. You can not have mixed laws on such a thing.
In response to the question about weather or not slavery should have been handled by each individual state or by the national government, I think it would have been difficult to allow for each state to have their own laws and policies considering they were at times vastly different. Slaves often were moved around, escaped or were freed. The laws that applied to them in some places were not applied to them in others causing conflict for both slaves and slave holders.
At that point in history. I believe it was fair for the government to allow Missouri to be a slave state. To keep equality in the Senate, I feel like they had the pressure to allow that to happen. While it ended up leading to more states allowing slavery, which equaled for slavery to happen across the U.S., it did make less fighting happen.
Once the African Americans were freed, they had no reason to fight back. They got what they wanted and if they had fought it would have just led to more problems than they wanted. They werent forced to move back to Africa so they may have also feared getting pushed back to Africa if they had caused too many outbreaks.
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