12.7 Interactive Knowledge Check: Slavery in America

1. During the colonial period, slavery in America was _________

2. Although founders like George Mason, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson expressed a desire to end slavery in theory, ______________

3. Which founder, when discussing his involvement with slavery, admitted that “I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them, I will not, I can not, justify it.”

4. A year after the Declaration of Independence, this man submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature, arguing for the abolition of slavery.

5. At the Constitutional Convention, where 25 of the 55 delegates were slaveholders, the framers________

6. Which of these is not true about the Constitution?

7. Because the House of Representatives is drawn based on each state’s population, a key question at the Convention was how to count the enslaved population. Ultimately, the delegates decided to __________

8. Although some northern states had begun to abolish slavery and the practice itself was banned in the Northwest Ordinace of 1787, the Fugitive Slave Clause________

9. By the time of the founding, even many slaveholders opposed the inhuman Atlantic slave trade. However, the issue led to heated debates at the Constitutional Convention, where the delegates ultimately agreed to ___________

10. The anti-slavery movement was part of America from the beginning. In January 1777, Prince Hall, a free African American in Boston, offered a petition for freedom in Massachusetts, drawing on the promises of the Declaration of Independence. By 1783_________

11. In his final public act, this framer and president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, sent a petition to Congress calling for the abolition of slavery and an end to the slave trade.

12. Abolition, the movement to end slavery, gained momentum in the early-to-mid 1800s. What was true about the abolition movement?

13. Ideas about freedom, equality, and the Constitution that emerged in the anti-slavery movement became the foundation for rise of Abraham Lincoln and the birth of this political party.

14. A major division emerged among abolitionist and anti-slavery leaders over the realtionship between slavery and the Constitution. Radical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips argued that _______

15. In contrast, some read the Constitution as a “glorious liberty document”. In 1860, ________, a formerly enslaved person and influential abolitionist, urged that the North should “now make that instrument bend to the cause of freedom and justice.”

16. In 1852, Frederick Douglass criticized the celebration of this holiday as a sham, given that millions of Americans were still enslaved.

17. Many anti-slavery advocates, including Abraham Lincoln, thought that the Constitution didn’t empower the national government to attack slavery where it already existed. These advocates__________

18. In 1857, the Supreme Court made its most important—and infamous—decision on slavery, arguing that African Americans “had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.” The name of this infamous case was __________

19. Drawing on his war powers as president, Abraham Lincoln issued this historic declaration on January 1, 1863, both affirming what was already happening and setting a new baseline for the treatment of slavery after the war.

20. After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments abolished slavery, wrote the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution, and banned racial discrimination in voting. This period, which some historians call America’s “Second Founding,” is also known as___________