STUDY+GUIDE+FOR+GAME+QUESTIONS

This is the page where you can review for the topics covered in the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction Candyland game. Questions contingent to your success in the game will cover these respective areas. (These are the answers to this portion's game questions)


 * 1) Sectionalism in the Antebellum Period:

North and south had a growing distaste for each other, fomenting in 1848 and finally bubbling to succession and war by 1861. What really caused the crisis to rise was new territories and the slave issue for settlers. After the Mexican-American War, Congress passed the Wilmot Proviso in which slavery was prohibited from all new territory. Michigan Democrat Lewis Cass was among the many to attempt compromise; probably doing the most for the crisis when he proposed popular sovereignty. According to the compromise, settlers in a territory had the right to vote whether to allow slavery or ban it. This caused violence in Kansas as slave power advocates illegally crossed into Kansas from Missouri just to vote on the slave issue. John Brown killed several pro slavery voters in the Sand Creek Massacre. This sectionalism also happened in DC congress when Preston Brooks caned Massachusetts Senator Sumner. One of the greatest examples of the effects of Popular Sovereignty involved the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854. Stephen Douglas used this act as a compromise to get the transcontinental railroad to pass through Chicago. By allowing popular sovereignty in the northern Kansas and Nebraska (the northern agreement for the Railroad route), Douglass effectively invalidated the compromise of 1820, prohibiting slavery north of 36 30. Other important congressional acts included the Compromise of 1850, which had 5 very important points. California would be admitted as a free state, the Mexican Cession would be divided in two and the land dispute with Texas would be resolved by giving the territory to the Cession and assuming Texas' 10 million debt. A new fugitive slave law was enacted and enforced, and a ban on the slave trade in Washington DC was enacted.

Sectionalism was also at play in the literary world. Harriet Beecher Stowe's book //Uncle Tom's Cabin// stirred up Northern abolitionist sentiments, and was even seconded by souther writers like Hinton Helper, who argued that slavery was bad for southern economy in //Impending Crisis of the South//. Other more radical authors like northerner William Garrison became well known for his fiery rhetoric and numerous death threats thanks to his radical newspaper. Southern Author George Fitzhugh made several points supporting slavery when he examined "equal rights for unequal men" and "wage slavery".\

Politically the North and South were also divided. In 1857 with the Dread Scott case, slavery was upheld and anitslavery laws were struck down. New political parties such as the Republicans in 1854, the Know-Nothings, and the Constitutional Union Party in 1860 were founded in response to the divide. Republicans based their platform on anti-slavery and their Presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, enjoyed popularity through the Lincoln-Douglass debates with his "House Divided" speech. In these debates, Lincoln challenged Douglas's Freeport Doctrine, which attempted to reconcile popular soverignty while upholding the Dread Scott Decision. It stated that slavery could only exist if the community gave it support with local laws. On the sidelines to the Republicans, the Know-Nothings purposely avoided the slave question and the Constitutional Union Party was concerned only with union between the north and south.