1. Attempts to maintain the Union 1845-1854

2. Mark off in your planner

3. Key Words: Great learning: Even better: Good learning:
Recall the people who make speeches about the 1850 Compromise
Great learning:
Explain different views on the compromise
Even better:
Decide how valuable primary sources for learning about the 1850 Compromise
Key Words:

4. Debates of the 1850 Compromise

5. Fact Test
You have been given a fact test containing 10 question on key people involved in the 1850 Compromise debates. You have 10 minutes to complete the test.
What didn’t you get – get someone to answer it

6. Adapted from the Seventh of March Speech to the US Senate (1850) by Daniel Webster, a leading Northern Senator. He gave this speech to the US Senate in favour of the Compromise.
Mr. President: I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American and a member of the Senate of the United States. It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States; a body not yet moved from its respectability, not lost to a just sense of its own dignity and its own high responsibilities and a body to which the country looks, with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic and healing counsels. It is not to be denied that we live in the midst of strong agitations and are surrounded by very considerable dangers to our institutions and government. The imprisoned winds are let loose. The East, the North and the stormy South combine to throw the whole ocean into commotion, to toss its billows to the skies and disclose its profoundest depths. I do not affect to regard myself, as holding, or as fit to hold, the helm in this combat with the political elements.
One together – then give half the class one source and other half of the class another source.

7. Let’s see what our resident expert would say!

8. Adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government Volume One (of Two), by Jefferson Davis, 1881
While the compromise measures of 1850 were pending and the excitement concerning them was at its highest, I one day overtook Mr. Clay, of Kentucky, and Mr. Berrien, of Georgia, in the Capitol grounds. They were in earnest conversation. It was the 7th of March, the day on which Mr. Webster had delivered his great speech. Mr. Clay, addressing me in the friendly manner which he had always employed since I was a schoolboy, asked me what I thought of the speech. I liked it better than he did. He then suggested that I should “join the compromise men,” saying that it was a measure which he thought would probably give peace to the country for thirty years. Then, turning to Mr. Berrien, he said, “You and I will be under ground before that time, but our young friend here may face trouble in the future.” I somewhat impatiently declared my unwillingness to transfer to future generations a problem which they would be relatively less able to meet than we were

9. TASK
On your table, see if you can reproduce the Americas source grid we use on a whiteboard.
Now, you have 20 minutes to plan an answer to the Jefferson Davis source
Your homework for next week will be to write up a full answer to this question.

10. Source Grid P EV EX Author Audience Date Type Purpose provenance P EV
tone P EV EX
argument

11. Texas and California

12. Mark off in your planner

13. Why might the admission of Texas and California into the Union have been a problem?

14. Fugitive Slave Law

15. Mark off in your planner

16. Key Words: Great learning: Even better: Good learning:
Recall the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
Great learning:
Explain different reactions to the Fugitive Slave Law
Even better:
Decide how far the Fugitive Slave law created tension between the North and South
Key Words:

17. Laws concerning Fugitive Slaves 10
How strict is the law? 5
Constitution
1793 FSL
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
1850 FSL

18. United States Constitution: Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3
No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.

19. Fugitive Slave Act 1793
Authorized local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners
Imposed a $500 penalty on anyone who aided runaway slaves in their flight.

20. Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842)
The Supreme Court declared a slaveholders right to his property overrode any contrary state legislation… but!
States did not have to offer aid in the hunting or recapture of slaves.

21. Fugitive Slave Act 1850
Federal Marshalls to raises posses to pursue fugitives on northern soil. Those who refuse to join risked a $1000 fine.
Federal Commissioners could determine the fate of alleged fugitives without a jury trial or testimony. (slavery more important than states rights??)
Not just recent runaway slaves, but those that had escaped in the decades previous
Any person aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to six months' imprisonment and a $1,000 fine

22. Create a drama or news report, conveying different reactions to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act

23. Slaves
Thousands of Fugitive slaves and free-born blacks fled to the safety of Canada
3000 went to Canada in last 3 month of 1850
1850s negro population in Ontario doubled to 11,000
They used underground railroads - network of secret routes and safe houses used to help fugitives flee into Canada. "Stations" were set up in private homes, churches, caves, barns and hidden places, to give escaped slaves places to stay on their way.
One slave, Margaret Garner, killed her daughter to prevent her from being returned into slavery by federal marshes

24. Abolitionists The Fugitive Slave Act appalled Northern Abolitionists
Abolitionists, aided fugitive slaves by violently resisting recapture.
A large crowd helped to rescue escaped slave Jerry from jail in Syracuse, New York.
An owner who tried to recapture his slave was killed in Christiana, Pennsylvania Pennsylvania newspaper: ‘Civil War – the first blow struck’
1854 a Boston mob broke into a courthouse and killed a guard in an attempt to rescue fugitive slave Anthony Burns. In the end, federal troops had to be sent in to escort Burns to Boston harbour where a ship carried him into slavery. (The people of Boston later purchased Burn’s freedom).
William Lloyd Garrisson ‘The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Act a dead letter, is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers’

25. Moderate Northerners
Accept the Fugitive Slave law as the price they had to pay to save the Union
The act contained a number a features which were distasteful to moderates
Vigilance committees sprang up in many Northern communities. Vigilance committees are groups formed of private citizens to administer law and order where they considered governmental structures to be inadequate.
9 states passed "personal liberty laws", mandating a jury trial before alleged fugitive slaves could be moved
others forbade the use of local jails or the assistance of state officials in the arrest or return of alleged fugitive slaves
In some cases, juries refused to convict individuals who had been accused under the Federal law.

26. Balance…
Overt resistance should not be exaggerated. The south and abolitionists exaggerated to amount of resistance. In most northern states the law was enforced.

27. Flipped Learning Read the handout you have been given on Abolitionism
Highlight 10 key points in the article about the growth of Abolitionism in the North
Star what you believe are the 3 most important points
DUE: Next America lesson

28. Save last one for future GB?

29. Adapted from The New York Herald, September 8, 1850
Adapted from The New York Herald, September 8, The New York Herald was a Northern, popular and controversial newspaper.
Within the short space of two days, the House of Representatives has passed four of the most important measures connected with the slavery agitation, which grew out of the acquisition of new territory through the Mexican War. Leaving only the Fugitive Slave Bill and the bill for the abolition of slave traffic in the District of Columbia to be disposed of, the former having been passed by the Senate and the latter being now under consideration in that body. The whole of this disagreeable subject will, therefore, be shortly wound up and a check put to the ultras and fanatics of different sections of the Union, who have exerted themselves to keep alive the slavery agitation and maintain an estrangement of feeling between the Northern and the Southern States. The subject, therefore, which has caused so much uneasiness to the friends of the Union everywhere, as well as to the admirers of our political institutions at home and abroad, is set at rest in a manner satisfactory to all.