An Elephant in Time

Our class's latest lesson was on the events leading up to the Civil War. The essential question was this: how do we know the debate over slavery was the "elephant in the room" for American politics in the early 19th century? We spent time learning about 8 events and putting them in a timeline, with events in favor of the north and anti-slavery advocates on top, and events in favor of slavery and the south down below. Some events had multiple parts, so there are multiple branching lines from a single dot.

The timeline itself. Events on the top half favor anti-slavery
advocates, the bottom half favors pro-slavery advocates.

This secondary part of the timeline includes descriptions of
the events pictured above.

The answer to the essential question is that politicians, rather than directly facing the dividing issue of slavery, made concessions and compromises on the minor issues that came up, thus skirting around the big issue at hand. The Compromise of 1850 consisted of five parts, some in favor of the north and some in favor of the south, so as to not upset the balance of free vs. slave states in the Senate. But by leaving some territories open to either side in the compromise, legislators set up a race to populate these territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act shows the result; the north wanted railroad access to western territories to populate those areas with anti-slavery settlers, and so they gave slavery a chance to grow north through those territories in exchange. This directly led to what became known as Bleeding Kansas. The Kansas settlers, torn between free-soil and pro-slavery ideals, became immersed in a near-civil war. Even two capitals were formed; Topeka for free-soil, Lecompton for pro-slavery. And yet, nothing came to stop it because nobody wanted to address the issue. The John Brown raid also shows politicians only taking an issue at face value and not addressing the underlying problem: John Brown, having raided a federal arsenal with the intent of starting a revolt of slaves, gets hanged for treason and nothing else happens, only a rising of tensions between the north and south.

This elephant in the room topic is interesting to see how politicians react to the issues, big and small, and how to recognize an elephant in the room situation and deal with the elephant first and foremost. The RWT Timeline app was fun to use, but fairly limited with a history of crashing. I like these types of activities, but perhaps on a different platform next time.