Slavery | EDSITEment

Lesson 3: A Debate Against Slavery

Sometimes, people will fight to keep someone else from being treated poorly. Disagreement over slavery was central to the conflict between the North and the South. The nation was deeply divided.

Lesson 4: Life Before the Civil War

Students demonstrate their knowledge of life before the Civil War, with an emphasis on differences between the North and South.

Lesson 5: Women's Lives Before the Civil War

What was life like for women in the first half of the 19th century in America? What influence did women have in shaping the attitudes towards slavery? Towards women's suffrage?

Lesson 1: Factory vs. Plantation in the North and South

Students develop a foundation on which to understand the basic disagreements between North and South.

Lesson 4: James Madison: Internal Improvements Balancing Act: Federal/State, Executive/Legislative

There was general agreement at the beginning of the 19th century that the U.S. would greatly benefit from some internal improvements of a national nature, such as a nationwide network of roads and canals. But how should the funds for such projects be raised? Who should be in control of the projects—that is, who should administer them?

Lesson 2: From Courage to Freedom: Slavery's Dehumanizing Effects

One of Douglass's goals in his autobiography is to illustrate beyond doubt that slavery had an insidious, spirit-killing effect on the slaveholder as well as the slave.

Lesson 4: Abraham Lincoln, the 1860 Election, and the Future of the American Union and Slavery

Created July 19, 2010

This lesson plan will explore Abraham Lincoln's rise to political prominence during the debate over the future of American slavery. Lincoln's anti-slavery politics will be contrasted with the abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass and the "popular sovereignty" concept of U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas.

Lesson 3: The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854: Popular Sovereignty and the Political Polarization over Slavery

Popular sovereignty allowed the settlers of a federal territory to decide the slavery question without interference from Congress. This lesson plan will examine how the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 affected the political balance between free and slave states and explore how its author, Stephen Douglas, promoted its policy of popular sovereignty in an effort to avoid a national crisis over slavery in the federal territories.

Lesson 2: Slavery's Opponents and Defenders

Idyllic cartoon of slaves thanking their master for taking care of them

This lesson plan will explore the wide-ranging debate over American slavery by presenting the lives of its leading opponents and defenders and the views they held about America's "peculiar institution."

Lesson 1: An Early Threat of Secession: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Crisis

Created July 18, 2010

Henry Clay, author of the Missouri Compromise.

Americans affirmed their independence with the ringing declaration that “all men are created equal.” But some of them owned African slaves, and were unwilling to give them up as they formed new federal and state governments. So “to form a more perfect union” in 1787, certain compromises were made in the Constitution regarding slavery. This settled the slavery controversy for the first few decades of the American republic, but this situation changed with the application of Missouri for statehood in 1819.

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