all right so this is a really straightforward overview of the events really between the Constitutional period and the American Civil War there isn't a straight line between those two periods there's a lot of efforts to resolve the situation regarding American Shadow slavery and a lot of compromises where in different parties in America try to find a solution to this ongoing issue ultimately to which they're not able to do during the Constitutional period there's two key things that happen in order to get the southern states to agree to the United States Constitution which is in a necessity if the Constitution is to become the law of the land those anti-slavery forces in the north recognize that they have to accept American Shadow slavery as an institution that is to say there was never a realistic opportunity to get rid of slavery during the Constitutional Convention and maintain the union so there's two key compromises one of which is supported by Northern anti-slavery individuals and one of which is supported by Southerners first is the three-fifth Compromise southerners wanted enslaved persons to count as people for the purposes of the Senate why because representation in the new House of Representatives was going to be based off of population and if they couldn't count enslaved individuals then those Southerners recognized that before long the more populous northern states would have vastly more representation in the House of Representatives and also get more electoral votes in the Electoral College because of course how many electoral votes each state got was a sum of its Representatives two senators plus the number of people in the house so what ends up happening is the two sides reach a deal they decide that quote unquote all other persons the Constitution never uses the word slave would count as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation this gives States like Virginia much more electoral clout going forward and is instrumental in such elections like the election of 1800 which Thomas Jefferson would not have won if States like Virginia North Carolina South Carolina didn't get that extra bump that they got from Counting enslaved persons now in exchange for this the deal was that on January the 1st 1800 if Congress wanted to it could end the Atlantic slave trade which Congress does on the first day of January in the year 1800 the slave trade comes to an end however by then slavery has become a self-perpetuating machine in the South speaking of machines slavery doesn't really get going without the cotton gin cotton was a commodity grown in the south in the late 18th century so was rice an indigo why did cotton become such a dominant force in the Southern economy and the answer is the cotton gin in 1793 a northerner Eli Whitney invents a machine to remove the seeds from the fiber of cotton prior to this southerner's growing cotton had to do this manually which is very cumbersome and it limited the amount of fiber that could be produced the cotton gin is actually extremely simple it's just a device that pulls the cotton through a set of wire teeth mounted on a revolving cylinder the Simplicity of this machine was the bad news for Eli Whitney because he was not able to effectively patent a machine that was so simple he died in poverty as a result what doesn't die was cotton cotton after the invention of the cotton gin becomes the dominant cash crop of the American South because suddenly it's a lot easier to manufacture the fiber now another thing that starts to happen as we get into the 19th century is new territories and states are added to the United States for example in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 a huge swath of the Midwest and chunk that runs along the Mississippi gets added as a result of the purchase from France what happens now is that different states are going to come into the union and the number one question for each one of these states is is this state going to be a slave state or is it going to be a free state every compromise that is addressing this issue from here to the election of 1860 and Abraham Lincoln is about how do we address adding new territories to the nation and will they be slave or will they be free the first time this comes up is in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise the Missouri Compromise is a political deal that was worked out by Henry Clay and the the basic compromise was this it's two-part number one Maine and Missouri are going to enter the Union at the same time Maine is a free state Missouri is a slave state this allows that important balance in the Senate to continue it is crucial from the southern perspective that they do not lose ground in the Senate if there's going to be two more voting senators from a northern free state then they want two new voting members from a Southern state it's never a question of will slavery be eliminated in the states where it exists currently their concern is always they want slavery to continue to expand into new territories whereas increasingly Northerners are opposed to that so Maine and Missouri come in and they offset each other the other decision out of the Missouri Compromise and this will be the law of the land until roughly 1854. is that slavery is prohibited north of the parallel of 36 30 which actually forms the southern boundary of Missouri so technically the state of Missouri violates the Missouri Compromise because it's north of that line but the idea is that in all future decisions any state that comes in south of the line will be a slave state any state that comes in north of the line will be a free state after the Missouri Compromise the next important event is actually one of the largest slave rebellions in American history Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 the problem was from Southern perspectives there's this constant Specter there's this ghost that is the slave rebellion lurking around every corner because in some situations in the South the enslaved numbers of individuals vastly outnumber the free white population after Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 the southern slave holding States increasingly takes steps which are restrictive in nature to try to prevent enslaved persons from being able to read being able to move about freely so it becomes an increasingly authoritarian situation wherein slaves are treated worse and worse to try to perpetuate the institution around the same time in 1831. a ship ran aground in the United States this ship was called La Amistad it was actually a Cuban ship that was transporting African slaves who had been kidnapped and went in today's Sierra Leone during this trip those enslaved persons were able to rebel and they took over the ship they intended to try to sail back to Africa but surreptitiously the Portuguese Masters and Spanish Sailors sailed the ship to the United States instead so the question then became are the slaves who took over the ship considered Salvage and thus the property of those who found the ship are they the property of the Spanish crown the property of the ship owner or were they illegally enslaved and transported in which case they would be considered free now this might seem like a relatively straightforward issue for us today but for many in the United States this was a Bellwether issue the question was is slavery going to get the rubber stamp of the Supreme Court at this point the Supreme Court ultimately sides with the enslaved Africans on the ship and rules that they are free the Amistad case becomes a major symbol for the Abolitionist Movement moving forward while all this is going on by the way there's three big ideas that are worth talking about nullification states rights and popular sovereignty because these are the big three concepts that are dictating the political side of this equation of course there's a social humanitarian side to slavery but we're just kind of looking at the political side of it in this lecture nullification is the oldest one and the one we've dealt with before this dates back to Thomas Jefferson in 1789 in the Kentucky Virginia resolutions nullification is the idea that the constitution is a compact it's a contract between the different states and if any state doesn't like something the federal government does it can nullify it unless it is overridden by three quarters of the states tied into this idea is this concept of states rights we in the United States practice a form of government that's called federalism Federalism is a balancing act between powers that are held by the states and powers that are held by the federal government states rights Advocates argue that the states are the ones who should have more rights in that equation and increasingly as we inch towards the Civil War Southern States get more and more aggressive about their assertion that their rights as States should come before anything that the federal government wants the last concept is a new one popular sovereignty popular sovereignty was the Silver Bullet That was supposed to solve this issue it was created in the brainchild of Stephen Douglas who is a United States senator from Illinois he's going to run against Abraham Lincoln in a little bit here and I'll talk about that in a second his idea was that any new territories that come into the Union should simply vote on slavery do they want to come in as a slave state do they want to come in as a free state and that way by the popular will I.E popular sovereignty the population at large gets to choose its own destiny this is going to backfire big time now the next compromise that comes up is going to be related to some new territories that come into the United States these come in as a result of Texas Independence and then the United States Mexican war Texas gains its independence from Mexico in 1836 but is not admitted into the Union until 1845 and will come in as a slave state its entrance into the United States almost immediately precipitates the United States Mexican war in 1846. as a result of the United States victory in that war all of what is today the American southwest is added to American territories I'm talking about States like Arizona Nevada Utah California so on and so forth so immediately now the question is okay we got a bunch of new land how are we going to deal with it hence the compromise of 1850. the Compromise of 1850 is a big complicated piece of legislation it essentially has five different bills number one it admits California as a free state number two it let Utah and New Mexico decide for themselves whether to be a slave or a free state number three it defined a new Texas New Mexico boundary number four it allowed other states to adopt popular sovereignty as well I'm talking about mostly Arizona here but number five is the big one and that is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. abolitionists hate the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. prior to this there was no federal law that allowed Southerners to recapture people who are trying to flee their conditions of servitude to the north and several free states in the north went out of their way to make sure that people who did flee to their borders were protected the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 put the end to that practice at least from Southern perspectives it gave Federal authorities the right to go into free states arrest people who had allegedly fled from their conditions of servitude and returned them to those conditions in the south the abolitionists despised this law because they felt for the first time it really made them complicit in this idea of slavery and it's going to be one of the hot bustion issues as we sort of creep towards the Civil War which is now only 10 years away the next thing that happens is called the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854. the Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repeals the Missouri Compromise it creates two new territories Kansas and Nebraska and even though they're both above that line so should have been free states by the Missouri Compromise they're going to go with Stephen Douglas's idea and say that the population at large is going to get to vote and whether they vote slave or free is going to dictate the outcome this leads to an absolute disaster that's commonly referred to as Bleeding Kansas because what happens is as soon as this decision is issued at the federal government level in 1854 both abolitionists and pro-slavery individuals armed to the teeth moved to Kansas because their idea is we're going to shift the vote one way or the other Southerners are desperate to make Kansas a slave state even though there's no cotton grown there by the way this is purely politics they want the two senators they want the electoral votes they don't really have any interest in using slave labor in either of these new territories at this point this political move abolitionists do the same thing they move to Kansas in a desperate effort to try to make sure Kansas comes out a free state there's a lot of violence that goes back and forth and one of the major casualties of these two decisions is what's called The Whig party so we have sort of the democratic party and the Whig party who are operating in the United States up till this point the disaster that is Kansas kills the Whig party once and for all in its place rises in 1854 the Republican party that we know it today one of the key platforms of the Republican party is that slavery should not be expanded into new territories I didn't say slavery should be ended that wasn't part part of the deal was that the Republicans didn't want slavery expanded and that's going to be key in 1860. in 1870 excuse me in 1857 the Supreme Court steps into the mix issuing the infamous Dred Scott Decision the Dred Scott decision is often cited as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time and it's got some good company there the basic facts of the case were this Dred Scott was taken into he was an enslaved man he was taken into a free territory he was then later on returned with his master to a slave territory he sued arguing that because he moved to a free territory his condition of servitude was obliterated the Supreme Court led by Justice Tawny issued a scathing horrifyingly racist decision in which not only did Justice Tawny reject the arguments made by Dred Scott confirming him as an enslaved person but he went one further he determined that African Americans could never be full United States citizens that the condition of slavery could not be prohibited by federal law and so in essence he hands the South the judicial victory that they couldn't get in the legislative branch he declares that slavery should be legal everywhere he was from Maryland by the way he was a southerner things heat up in 1858 in 1858 Abraham Lincoln a new Republican candidate clashes with Stephen Douglas the popular sovereignty guy they're both running against each other for the seat in the United States Senate in Illinois while Douglas ultimately emerges Victorious this is Abraham Lincoln's first step onto the stage and before long he will be running for the United States presidency as the first ever legitimate Republican candidate for the office that however will be a subject I will cover in another lecture