History of the United States I / Unit 9 USH1 1256 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Four Classes, Four Views of Slavery
The idea
The anchor organises the whole section around one question, and the answers do not line up the way a student expects. The economic elite supported slavery because the cotton trade paid them. The self-made manufacturers celebrated work against the planter's leisure. The middle class opposed slavery because it promoted idleness and offended their theory of merit. And the wage workers, who owned nothing, opposed abolition hardest of all, because free Black labour would compete with theirs.
In practice
Four positions on one institution, each following from where the holder stood in the northern economy.
Where people slip
Not one of these four positions is primarily about the enslaved. Each is about what slavery meant for the person holding the opinion. This is the single most useful frame in the unit for the exam's social-developments band, and it is also the reason the North's opposition to slavery was so much narrower than its later reputation suggests. Unit 13 introduces the people who argued on entirely different grounds.
Your place on the trail
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