History of the United States I / Unit 15 USH1 2106 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Confederate Constitution
The idea
The Confederate Constitution declared that the new nation existed to defend and perpetuate racial slavery, and the leadership of the slaveholding class. It protected the interstate slave trade and guaranteed slavery in any new territories. It provided a Congress of two chambers, a judicial branch, and a six-year presidential term. Article One, Section Nine forbade any law impairing or denying the right of property in negro slaves. Section Nine also banned the importation of enslaved people from any foreign country, with an exception for the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America.
In practice
A founding document that names the institution it exists to protect, written by the people seceding to protect it.
Where people slip
Two things follow. First, this is the strongest available answer to the claim that the war was not about slavery, because it is the seceding states saying so in their own founding text. Second, read the exception in the import ban. Banning the Atlantic trade reassured Britain while protecting purchase from the United States, which is the domestic trade Unit 12 teaches. Unit 14's Lecompton Article VII did the same work at territorial scale.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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