Drew Choike
Dr. Greer
American History
December 1, 2017
Reading response chapter #3 Many high school students are taught in their respective history classes growing up about battles, wars, and important moments in U.S. history without actually connecting these events to other happenings of relevance going on at about the same time in history around the world, making it hard for some students to think about dates and link the events together as being during the same time period. Chapter three of A Nation Among Nations by Thomas Bender entitled “Freedom in an Age of Nation Making” examines these different events around the world at about the same time as the American Civil War between the Union made up of the northern states and the Confederacy made up of the southern states.
The opening of the chapter explains how a democratic congressman from Pennsylvania by the name of David Wilmot proposed the Wilmot Proviso that would ban slavery in any western territory gained from Mexico in the Mexican-American war. The bill was passed in the house but not in the senate. Bender uses this event as an example to show how divided people were about the issue of slavery. They were so divided that congress couldn’t agree with one another on allowing or not allowing slavery in an area they didn’t even acquire yet.
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In this time and age ideas moved only as fast as goods did over land or sea, but the news of the civil war held a simple message which was one to end slavery because slaves are people and people have unalienable rights as later stated in the constitution, forget about Jim Crow laws later in history at this point, they were trying to do the right thing even though many historians do not believe the United States would have made it as a country without the help of slave