Liberty Challenged in Nineteenth Century America: Thesis Statement and Outline

Thesis Statement

While the birth of the US as a constitutional republic paved way for vast changes, some peculiar historic events, such as slavery and constitutional amendments, remained instrumental in shaping the way Americans lived. The socioeconomic and political aspects of the slaves and their masters were changed due to the pressure to embrace a favorable human order.

Outline

1. Liberties in the Nineteenth Century
2. The 3/5th Compromise
3. Factors that led to the compromise that occurred in 1787 between the southern and northern states during the American Constitution Convention (Lewis, 2017).
4. The incommensurable representation of slave states compared to the free states in the House of Representative and the question of democracy (Corbertt et al., 2014).
5. Missouri Compromise
6. Maintaining power balance between Free states and Slave states.
7. Impact of the amendment on the Louisiana Territory by dividing into slavery and anti-slavery regions (Corbertt et al., 2014).
8. Compromise of 1850
9. Five bills passed by the Congress to diffuse the tension between Slave states and Free states.
10. Stricter Fugitive Slave Law enacted (Randall & Donald, 2016).
11. Kansas – Nebraska Act
12. The division that resulted from the Kansas-Nebraska Act and how it contributed to the Civil War (Brinkley, 2015).
13. People in the Nebraska Territory and Kansas Territory were able to decide on the issues of slavery or anti-slavery (Corbertt et al., 2014).
14. Dred Scott Decision
15. The constitution drafted in 1787 did not acknowledge black people as persons, but as property, which prompted the Supreme Court to consider Scott as a slave (Corbertt et al., 2014).
16. Tensions that resulted after the Supreme Court decision (Brinkley, 2015).
17. Why slavery was and is incompatible with the US political and economic system.
18. Slavery as a historic institution that involved showing off across slave owners rather an investment to generate profits.
19. Industrial revolution only occurred after end of slavery in the US (Corbertt et al, 2014).
20. Slavery was and is brutal and inefficient in (Slavery: An Economic Perspective, n.d.)
21. Driving forces that led to the Civil War (Corbertt et al. 2014)
22. Lincoln’s election.
23. The Abolitionist Movement.
24. Tension between Northern and Southern regions over slavery.
25. The Dred Scott Decision
26. The Missouri’s Compromise

References

Brinkley, A. (2015). The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, Volume I (Vol. 11, p. 7271). McGraw-Hill.

Corbertt, P. S., Jansenn, V., Lund, J., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, S., & Vickery, P. (2014). U.S. history. OpenStax College.

Lewis, J.E. (2017). What happened to the Three-Fifths Clause: the relationship between women and slaves in constitutional thought, 1787–1866. Journal of the Early Republic 37(1), 1-46. Doi: 10.1353/jer.2017.0000.

Randall, J. G., & Donald, D. (2016). The Civil War and Reconstruction. Pickle Partners Publishing.

Slavery: An Economic Perspective. (n.d.). University of Nevada. Retrieved from https://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/t_oleson/echist/slavery2.html