History of the United States I / Unit 17 USH1 2426 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Forced Migration
The idea
The largest internal migration of this period was not voluntary. Congress banned the Atlantic slave trade from eighteen oh eight, and the domestic trade expanded to replace it, moving enslaved people from the exhausted soils of the upper South to the cotton lands of the Deep South. Families were separated at market. Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped and sold, recorded the market and the quota system he was worked under, and Unit 12 entries 1668 and 1681 carry his account.
In practice
A forced migration of roughly a million people inside the United States, conducted as a business, with its own markets, prices and credit.
Where people slip
Keep this beside entry 2427 and do not let the voluntary migration crowd it out. Immigration is the migration students expect to be asked about, and in this period the forced movement of enslaved people was comparable in scale and far more consequential for the region that received it. It is also the migration the Confederate Constitution protected by name while banning the Atlantic trade, which entry 2402's logic predicts exactly.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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