Wednesday, March 18, 2015

A Nation Divided

Pre Civil War, the United States was filled with tension revolving around the topic of slavery. Views on the topic changed by region, which can be seen in the results of the presidential election of 1860. As can be seen in the image to the right, the Northwest and West supported Lincoln, while the South supported Breckinridge. Lincoln was against slavery while Breckinridge believed there should be no laws against slavery. This clearly shows the division of beliefs, from antislavery views in the North to pro-slavery views in the South. Apart from those two candidates, however, Missouri supported Douglas. Missouri would support Douglas because of their geographic proximity to Kansas and Nebraska, with Douglas’ support of popular sovereignty. These people believed in popular sovereignty and wanted to make decisions based on slavery for themselves. Lastly, the border states (Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia) supported Bell. Bell believed in keeping the country the same as it was, with no major changes made to the system. The people of the border states supported this viewpoint because they didn’t want to be in the middle of any fighting between the north and south that would come of attempts to make change.
After learning this information, our class was to make a video about the election and its surrounding events through their primary sources. To do this, we used the site Civil War in Art for research and Educreations to create the actual video, which is below.

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