We Should've Seen It Coming: The American Civil War

This week in class we looked at the divisions between proslavery and antislavery activists caused by the events in the Election of 1860 and how these divisions led to the American Civil War. We started the week by watching the CrashCourse video on the Civil War. Then, throughout the week, we worked on creating documentaries using Educreations, outlining the events leading up to the Civil War. We used a multimedia website as an outline for the information we would use and found three outside images to feature in our video. My group had a little trouble recording the video: we forgot to add a voice recording over the title slide and added it after the fact, pushing the title slide back to the point in the project in which we recorded it. Educreations is not my favorite recording tool, but it was useful in stringing together our compiled data to highlight the main ideas of our topic. 

North Rules South Drools

North Rules South Drools | Create infographics

This past week my class and I created infographics to illustrate the difference between the North and South and how their differences affected each region’s strategy and success in the civil war. I chose to make my infographic using infogr.am. In terms of advantages, the South was mainly carrying themselves on their profit from agriculture, which is why I started my infographic with information about their crops. My infographic then carried on to provide information on the North’s strong suits, of which there seemed to be many. I got the majority of these characteristics from a document describing the advantages of the North and South and another document which provided exact statistics for the information I displayed in my infographic. I concluded my infographic with a display of the differing populations. Because the South didn’t have enough people to fight in the war and keep their economy up, they decided they would bring outside forces on their side to build up their numbers. The South denied their exports to Great Britain and France in hopes Europe would support them in order to gain their cotton back. Europe instead turned to Egypt and India for their cotton, leaving the Deep South in deep trouble. On the other hand, although the South had only a fraction of the North’s population, most of the country’s military colleges and trained officers were in the South. And, because the Northerners were seeking to abolish an already existent system in the South, requiring them to raid and overtake all Southerners, the North’s route of battle seemed much harder to take than the South’s. Southerners planned on a war of attrition, which meant they would turn back union forces until they lost the will to fight. This backfired- the Northern spirits only grew stronger. They knew what they wanted to fight for and would not rest until it was achieved. Rather than simply looking at the statistics of the war, this project gave us the opportunity to analyze data given to us and find it’s relevancy to the outcome of the war. I have a strong understanding of the impact these statistics had on the American Civil War. 

What To Do When The Elephant Tamers Ignore The Elephant

Throughout the 19^th century, the debate over slavery was the “elephant in the room” because an answer was never directly stated by authority. Instead, the authority sided with their own individual beliefs and fought against the opposing side- ignoring their opportunities in government to use their power to compromise with leaders from the other side of the debate.

My group's timeline of the slavery revolt.
Made with TimeLine app.

Description of events included in my group's timeline. 

            The first event we learned about in class was the Compromise of 1850. This compromise can be summed up into five parts. The majority of the parts worked in favor of slavery. Texas gave up its land expanding to Santa Fe, receiving $10 million, and entered as a slave state. This was a win for proslavery because it gave the south more land to run slavery. New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah territories can vote proslavery or antislavery when they’re populated enough to be considered states. This is a win for proslavery because these territories can easily be filled with proslavery settlers who will vote in favor of slavery. The worst was the fugitive slave law. This says all Americans should work to return slaves to their owners. Many northerners had been working to help slaves escape slavery and this law prevented them from continuing to do so. It was obviously passed by proslavery government without the consultation of antislavery government. They had the opportunity to collaborate and find a solution, but they do not. Instead, they pass a law without the approval of officials from the opposite side of the argument. Americans ended up breaking this law anyways, so I was ineffective even through the eyes of the proslavery officials who passed it.

Caning of Charles Sumner.
Take from class notes on edline. 

Another example of the government immaturely ignoring their ability to solve the problem rather than simply fight with their side occurred in 1856 and is referred to as the “Caning of Charles Sumner”. Sumner was a leading republican and one of the leading voices against slavery in congress. He gave a speech called The Crime Against Kansas which attacked Southerners for attempting to force slavery in the territories. Representative Preston Brooks, a proslavery member of the House of Representatives, who was attending Sumner’s speech, was enraged by the accusations made towards the South. In attempt to defend the South, Brooks beat Sumner with his cane. In response to this, southerners showed great support towards Brooks, even mailing him canes with the message “beat him again”. Instead of confronting the issue with Sumner verbally and finding a long term solution that would benefit both of their sides, Brooks reacted in a way that only fueled the debate even more. The government officials at this time weren’t working towards ending the debate. They were making their opinions well known and sharing the messages their sides were trying to get across, but they refused to comprehend the possibility of compromise. Because of this, the debate went on for centuries longer than it should have.