Personal Liberty Laws and the Fugitive Slave Laws

APStudynotes is a great site you should be using all the time. But here is a great section you need to read on the 1850s: http://www.apstudynotes.org/us-history/topics/decade-of-crisis/ This goes all the way from slave resistance to the Ostend Manifesto. Read it.

This gives an overview of the beginning of personal liberty laws being used even before the new Fugitive Slave Law of 1850: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/1842.html

Video: Franklin Pierce

From the History Channel. Click on the text to go to their website.

President Franklin Pierce

Pierce had some tragedies in his life, too. Does a good job explaining the importance of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Ichabod, by John Greenleaf Whittier

 

Here is a short summary of the poem and its background (http://www.enotes.com/ichabod-salem/ichabod).

This was written in response to Webster’s Seventh of March Speech, urging passage of the Compromise of 1850 in the name of national unity and preservation of the Union.

Attractive Stupid People: Poor Franklin Pierce….

Christine Lavin, helping you all out in a musical way. Here is a link where you can play the song and read the lyrics as it plays:
http://www.christinelavin.com/index.php?page=songs&family=&archives=show.

Meanwhile, here are the lyrics we listened to in class.

Attractive Stupid People
by Christine Lavin

“Seventh of March” speech

Daniel Webster was a respected orator and politician who represented both New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the House of Representatives at different times. He also served as a US Senator for Massachusetts off and on from 1827 to 1850. As a lawyer, he represented Dartmouth College in the Supreme Court case of Dartmouth v. Woodward.

His rise to national prominence as an orator began with his reply to South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne in a debate over the nature of the Union and the doctrine of nullification in January of 1830. This debate was known as the Webster-Hayne debate.

Fugitive slave poster 1

Questions to consider:
1. How specific is the description from this poster? What problems could be created through this use of vague terminology?
2. What is your reaction to the physical description of Tom?
3. Why is there a sliding scale for the reward?

Virtual Underground Railroad

Go to http://www.nationalgeographic.com/railroad/ and enjoy a brief audio-visual presentation on the Underground Railroad.

A commentary on Whig presidential candidates

 

What symbols are used in this cartoon? What kind of commentary is this making regarding the Whig party? What apparently is the “one qualification for a Whig president?”

Images from a slave society

Slaves working in a cotton field

Despite slaveowners’ protests, all ages were often expected to work.

working in a rice field

Working conditions were often brutal.

One of the practices ended by the Compromise of 1850 was the slave trade in Washington DC. As a southern city, slavery had been legal in our nation’s capital from its founding. Here is a description of a slave pen used to hold slaves before they were sold, by E. S. Abdy:

One day I went to see the “slaves’ pen”–a wretched hovel, “right against” the Capitol, from which it is distant about half a mile, with no house intervening. The outside alone is accessible to the eye of a visitor; what passes within being reserved for the exclusive observation of its owner, (a man of the name of Robey,) and his unfortunate victims. It is surrounded by a wooden paling fourteen or fifteen feet in height, with the posts outside to prevent escape and separated from the building by a space too narrow to admit of a free circulation of air. At a small window above, which was unglazed and exposed alike to the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so trying to the constitution, two or three sable faces appeared, looking out wistfully to while away the time and catch a refreshing breeze; the weather being extremely hot. In this wretched hovel, all colors, except white–the only guilty one–both sexes, and all ages, are confined, exposed indiscriminately to all the contamination which may be expected in such society and under such seclusion. The inmates of the gaol [jail], of this class I mean, are even worse treated; some of them, if my informants are to be believed, having been actually frozen to death, during the inclement winters which often prevail in the country. While I was in the city, Robey had got possession of a woman, whose term of slavery was limited to six years. It was expected that she would be sold before the expiration of that period, and sent away to a distance, where the assertion of her claim would subject her to ill-usage. Cases of this kind are very common.

This excerpt is from the excellent pbs companion website called Africans in America at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/ .

Sometimes slaves received their manumission, or freedom. As the Civil War approached, most southern states passed laws forbidding free blacks to reside within their borders– those that did not immediately leave risked being re-enslaved. Many of these slaves moved to Washington, DC, and by 1860, free blacks outnumbered slaves in Washington by a ratio of 4 to 1. Here is a certificate of manumission:

The Clay Compromise measures, by John C. Calhoun, 1850

1. What does Calhoun claim to be the two causes of the present crisis between North and South? 2. What role do tariffs play in the South’s discontent? 3. How does Calhoun explain the growth of population in the North over that of the South, especially with respect to immigration? 4. As you look at your map of the territories in the US at this time, what problem does Calhoun foresee, and in what areas, that will exacerbate the problem? 5. What remedy does he claim the North must make in order to preserve the Union?