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Did The Dred Scott's Decision Galvanize Opposition To Slavery Among Northerners

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A House Divided 1) Why did the Dred Scott decision galvanize opposition to slavery among northerners? Dred Scott was a Supreme Court ruling in 1857 that rejected citizenship for African Americans and said that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery. This ruling upset a lot of northerners because it would allow the practice of slavery to spread into non-sale states. At this time, slavery was a very hot-button issue and northerners weren’t even comfortable with it even in the South. So this ruling, which allowed the practice to spread, was thought to be antithetical to the ideas of freedom and equality that America stood for. 2) What were Helper's, Fitzhugh's, Lincoln's, and Douglas's views on black people? Were they racists or not? Each of these individuals …show more content…

So I’m going to go through each individual and give them their exact few and then determine if these views lead to them being racist. Hinton Rowan Helper was an anti-slavery advocate, but not for the reason that you would think. He doesn’t think slavery is wrong or immoral, but instead just believes that it was economically damaging for poor white people and that it only helped the small elite. He thinks that slavery takes away working opportunities for poor white people since why would a rich white person pay a poor poor white person to do the job that they can get an enslaved black person to do for free, Saying. "The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, who are only nominally free, but they are also the owners and lords of the poor, non-slaveholding whites." If you break this down, he’s just saying that slavery just leads to rich white people being in charge of blacks and whites because they employ the white people. He also believed that slavery kept the South backward compared to the North, thinking that it didn’t help with their evolution. Is Helper a racist? In my opinion, he's not a blatant racist, but at the same time he didn’t condemn slavery for the

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