4-4.6

It Is Essential For Students To Know:

• Ideals of equality were described in the Declaration of Independence, including “Allmen are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”.
• However, this part of the Declaration of Independence was slow to take hold due to the continued practice of slavery in the new United States.
• After the Revolutionary War, Northern states gradually emancipated their slaves as a result of these ideals and because they were not economically dependent on slave labor.
• However, African Americans were discriminated against in Northern states. Often they were the last hired and the first fired. They were denied access to some schools and lived in segregated African American communities.
• In the South, some slave owners liberated their own slaves voluntarily.
• However, many southern states prohibited emancipation and slavery became more and more entrenched.
• The Three-Fifths Compromise was one of many compromises reached at the Philadelphia Convention where the new Constitution was written.
• When the Great Compromise of 1787 determined that congress would be divided into two Houses and that the House of Representatives was to be based on population, the question arose as to whether slaves would be counted when allocating representation.
• Slave owners in the South wanted to count their slaves as a full person, so that they would have a larger representation in Congress.
• Those in the North argued that if a person was owned they did not have the same rights as a free person and so should not be counted.
• The compromise that resulted was that slaves counted as 3/5 of a person. Under this North/South compromise, slaves still had no rights and could not vote.
• The Constitutional Convention protected slavery by agreeing that the international slave trade would not be ended for at least 20 years after the ratification of the Constitution.[1808]
• The Fugitive Slave Acts were laws made to support the rights of slave owners to maintain their slaves as property. It required the federal government to assist in the retrieval and return of runaway slaves no matter where they were found in the United States.
• A stronger Fugitive Slave Act was passed as part of the Compromise of 1850. The runaways were not provided with a fair trial or the opportunity to prove that they should be free.
• It was only after the Civil War, emancipation and the civil rights movement of the 20th century that African Americans could enjoy the equal rights promised in the Declaration of Independence.

It Is Not Essential For Students To Know:

• It is not essential for students to know all of the other provisions of the Constitution, the 3/5s compromise or the Fugitive Slave Act.
• Students do not need to know how or when each northern state emancipated their slaves.
• Students do not need to know that other actions of the national government attempted to limit the expansion of slavery. For instance, the Northwest Ordinance made slavery illegal in any new states that were formed from this region. However new states created from the Louisiana Purchase were open to slavery. The Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state but limited slavery to the area south of the 36 30’.
• Controversies over whether or not new territories would be slave or free led to the Civil War.
• Twenty years after the ratification of the Constitution, the national government outlawed the international slave trade but smuggling and the internal slave trade continued.
• The Dred Scott decision ruled that African Americans, slave or free, were not citizens of the United States and so had no rights at all.