Election of 1860

This week in class we discussed the election of 1860. To help us learn more about it we watched a crash course video about the election and read the article Civil War in Art. Civil War in Art was a collection of primary source pictures about the Civil War with descriptions of each picture by their side. We read and then created an educreation video about all the pictures and what they meant. Also in.o that video we answered the question Were the results of the Election of 1860 representative of the deep divisions over slavery? This question is basically asking did the outcome of who won the election have anything to do with how the north and south have such different opinions on slavery. This is the link to our video and the original script: 

Our Educreations

>It all started off with John Browns Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. 

>Northern Republicans were equally angered by the recent Supreme Court decision in case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, declaring free soil unconstitutional. Northern Democrats, meanwhile, struggled to convince Americans that their policy of popular sovereignty still made sense. 

>The Democratic Party split into three groups each with different ideas on how to deal with slavery in the west. These three parties lined up against Abraham Lincon, of the Republican Party, who was running for president. Who advocated that the west be free entirely. Lincon won with less than 40% of the popular vote and 59% of the electoral college. His election was fair but pushed the Deep South to succession. 

>The states didn't like that Lincon was trying to reunite the union. 

>As a responce to Lincons election South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas succeeded from the union and formed a new nation called The Confederate States of America and named its president Jefferson Davis. 

>The upper south and the rest of the Union urged the Deep South that has succeeded, to come back to the Union. When Lincon was inoggurated on March 4th 1861 he gave a speech and incourraging people to return to the south and promises that he would protect slavery where it is already existing. 

>Lincon didn't want the confederacy to take control of the United States military force in the south. Lincon wanted to protect fort sumpter from being attacked and taken over so he sent unarmed supply ships to the fort and told Jefferson Davis his plan. The confedeacy attached the forts before the ships had arrived. 

>Virgina,Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas joined the confedeacy to protest Lincons mission to reunite the union. Only Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware because the boarder states because they remained in the union although the they were slave states. 

>The Northern public became extremely interested in  patriotism after the attack in fort sumpter. Many artists began to record the events that happened there. For example; Frederic E. Church's painting Our Banner in the Sky, created in 1861, shows a tattered flag in the sky much like the one that would have been discovered after the attack.  

>Currier and Ives' publishing of the Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor, a print showing the battle from the Confederate point of view, marked the beginning of a very important new relationship between the artist and the public. This newfound relationship allowed the public to see and understand what was occurring in the war from different vantage points. 

Citations

Abraham Lincoln:

Painting a national treasure: https://www.jeremypenn.com/2014/08/painting-abraham-lincoln/

Jefferson Davis:

History.com: http://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2013/12/jefferson-davis-portrait-AB.jpeg

Abraham Lincoln 2:

Stufffromthelab.com: https://stufffromthelab.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized-stuff/page/46/

All other pictures:

Civil war in Art: http://www.civilwarinart.org/exhibits/show/causes/introduction/the-election-of-1860-and-seces

Let's Talk About The Elephant in The Room

In class we made a timeLine regarding pro slavery and anti slavery in the civil war. We seperated the pro and the anti. In order to figure out which event was pro or anti we had to read about them. Once we figured it out we wrote a brief description and for some we put a picture. The picture of the timeline is below...

In the early 19th century the main topic or the "elephant in the room" of American politics was slavery. Just because it was a predominant focus doesn't mean they wanted it to be. The government wanted to avoid it. Slavery was such a big topic because people were finally reliving it wasn't right and that things needed to change. The government wanted to ignore it because they had always relied on slates and didn't want tot give that up. This was very obvious during the Dred Scott Case in March of 1857. A black slave filed a lawsuit against Missouri stating that he and his wife should be freed because they used to live in states where slavery was illegal. The court ended up saying no they should not be free because thecnically they are slaves and slaves can't sue anyone. This discuted the antislavery activists. 

Slavery is Entrenched

Cotton was a main factor of why slavery was entrenched in the early 19th century. In class we went to the computer lab and did a activity online. We looked through a website that had a timeline of how slavery was changing overtime and the growth of the cotton crops. We took notes at each time stop in the timeline. 

Cotton was rapidly growing and earning so much money, by the 1860s cotton was up to $191,800,000! Since the production of cotton was growing the cotton gin was created. The cotton gin was a machine that got the seeds out of cotton efficiently and effectively. It was blades that pushed out the seeds for softer and seedless cotton. This made production faster and made the cotton softer and cleaner! 

People thought slavery was "declining" in the late 18th century because slaves were being freed and escaping. But that was not the case slavery was actually increasing, "Between 1792, when Whitney invented the cotton gin, and 1794, the price of slaves doubled. By 1825, field hands, who had brought $500 apiece in 1794, were worth $1,500. As the price of slaves grew, so, too, did their numbers. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the number of slaves in the United States rose by 33 percent; during the following decade, the slave population grew another 29 percent" this shows how slavery was increasing.  

                                                                      

Womens Reform

In the 19th century women were fed up being treated like unequaled. They wanted equal rights to men but that didn't go over well with the general population of America. For all eternity before this uprising women in Americas role in life was to be the sole caretaker of the family and home. Since this had been going on so long this is all Americas knew as to the extents of women's rights or lack there of. But everything changed in Seneca Falls in July of 1848 in New York. That was where and when the first women's right movements conference was. Most people hated the idea of women having rights. They wanted women to back down from trying to change their rights and stay unequal to the men as they have been. This opinion of keeping women in their submissive state was so wide spread that even the newspapers were apologizing for the women's actions. "We are sorry to see that women, in several parts of this State, are holding what they call 'Women's Rights Movements' and setting forth a formidable list of those Rights, in a parody upon the Declaration of American Independence." This was in The Mechanics Advocate. This shows that this was originally an absurd idea to most people. Also that they didn't want people to think that what they were doing was okay and for people to catch on and join the reform. 

North v. South

This week in class we made Infogr.ams comparing the North and the South. I made my Infogr.am about about the types of slave labor and the average number of slaves that masters own. I also talked about how the South was much more passive than the North was when it came to their plan for the war. The South was planning on waiting at the shore and preparing to fight while the North decided to block off all the Souths ports and didn't wait and prepare they went for it. Also, the north had far more railroads so they had more opportunities to move around and an easier transport system for food and ammunition during the war.