Tuesday, March 3

Today begins our discussion on how our country came to go to war against itself in what we call the Civil War. The buildup to war will happen over many years so we will begin with learning about the Missouri Compromise which happened in 1820, 41 years before the first shots were fired in the Civil War.

We started today looking at the list of states and their year of admission into the Union on handout #3. To start we will only consider the states down to the #22 state to enter the Union, Alabama. You should mark each state with an "F" if it was a "free" state and did not allow slavery and an "S" if it was a "slave" state and did not allow slavery. When you are finished with this create a T chart in the extra space listing Free vs Slave states. When you are finished you should have eleven of each on your chart. **Note-if you don't have eleven each check Delaware and Maryland. Most people think of these as Free states but they did allow slavery. Also, only go to Alabama.

Now that you have eleven free and eleven slave states on your list you should color them on the backside of handout #3. Color free states one color and slave states another color. When you are finished coloring these 22 states you should easily see that the distinction between slave and free breaks down purely by geography. Slave states were in the South and free states were in the North. You probably knew that already but now you can easily see it.

Now back to why having an even breakdown of states (11 and 11) was so important during the early 1800's-neither side, North or South, could gain an advantage in government over the other because the power was balanced. To understand this further you need to have an understanding of U.S. Government. We took the following notes on the back of handout #2:

U.S. Government:
3 Branches -
Executive Branch - Pres, VP & Cabinet - Enforce Laws
Legislative Branch - Congress - Make Laws
Judicial Branch - Supreme Court - Are Laws Constitutional?

Legislative Branch -
House of Representative - States' population determines how many Representatives a state has
Senate - 2 Senators per state

Both Houses of Congress have to pass a bill for it to become a law.

Because of the structure of U.S. Government if there was an equal number of slave and free states they balanced each other out in the Senate. Or in other words, if a slave state senator proposed a bill that would extend slavery throughout the country the vote would be 22 to 22 in the Senate (11 states in each section x 2 senators per state) and thus the bill would not be passed. If a northern senator proposed a bill that abolished slavery throughout the country the best he could hope for in a vote would be again 22 to 22 because all Southern senators would vote against this bill. In this way the Free states and the Slave states were balanced equally in power and neither could hurt the other.

The monkey wrench that could be thrown into this is what if balance between free and slave cannot be maintained. More on that tomorrow.