The Elephant in the Room

  Recently, we have been learning about a topic that that goes with the famous phrase, "the elephant in the room". This phrase is a metaphor referring to an obvious truth that is being either unaddressed or ignored. The "elephant in the room" that we are referring to in this unit and in 19th century American politics was slavery. In class we learned about important events and people during this time such as The Compromise of 1850, Bleeding Kansas and the Lincoln-Douglas Debate. My class broke up into groups and gathered some information about these events. From the information we gathered we were able to create the timeline shown below.







We created these timelines using the application RTW Timeline. The first event that we documented was the Compromise of 1850. This compromise was only a temporary solution, to a problem that had no end in sight. The Gadsden Purchase that followed in 1853 worried Northern antislavery advocates because they couldn't get to this new territory as fast as the southerners could to settle it and vote it as either a free or slave state. As a result, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed which allowed Northerners to get to these new territories and settle them by railroad easier than the South could. They wanted to settle and get enough people there to vote them as salve states. The result, "Bleeding Kansas" The Missouri Compromise no longer is relevant considering it isn't being put into affect. The solutions still didn't do the trick.  To follow, Dred Scott thinks he should be free because he and his wife live in a free state, but court rules he is a slave and slaves aren't free or citizens. There was still so much controversy and no solution. This is shown when Charles Sumner makes a fiery anti slavery speech and is later attacked with a cane by Preston Brooks. This proves that slavery is still an ongoing unsolved issue that cause civilized men to resort to violence to show what they believe.