Major Concepts:

Suggested lesson/activities:

1. Explain to the students how the shipping industry today depends upon the ability to carry cargo both ways. Cite modern examples, including railroad cars, trailers from tractor-trailer vehicles, cargo ships, and airplanes -- all of which must both unload and load materials. It does not pay to return to a home port with empty containers. The same was true in colonial America. Describe the slave trade triangle created by the merchant seamen of New England. Ships would leave Boston, Mystic, New London, etc., loaded with rum bound for European ports. In Europe, the shipowners would sell the rum and use some cash to purchase items that the Portuguese in East Africa would want to buy. Sailing to East Africa, they would exchange goods and cash for captured natives. From Africa, with their hulls crammed full of Africans, they proceeded to the various ports in the Caribbean where they would exchange the Africans for sugar cane and molasses. The "Triangle" was closed by a return to New England where the sugar cane and molasses would be turned into rum. In this way one could argue that the "Northerner" was not a slave trader but just a transporter of people. It would be the persons who eventually purchased people from the Spaniards and others in the Caribbean who turned the process into slave trading. So it was rationalized. Do students find this rationalization persuasive?

2. There are many resources available to students that vividly describe this enslaving process and its dehumanization of African men, women, and children -- from the Africans' capture in tribal warfare to their deplorable living conditions in southern plantations. These should be explored in individual assignments. The teacher is reminded that slavery was not limited to the South in colonial America. The teacher should make available some excerpts from W. E. B. Dubois's account of the African slave trade in colonial New England for evidence of this.

3. Draw on material presented in John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (7th ed. 1994) to illustrate the differing living conditions faced by African Americans in the North, South, and West. [As an additional note on this subject, indicate that W. E. B. Dubois was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Such an educational experience was anathema to most people in the South. Note, however, that Harvard awarded its first Ph.D. to an African American at the close of the nineteenth century.] Students are to seek other differences between the various sections which accounted for the differences in slavery from section to section. (Even though slavery was extinct in the Northern states above the Mason-Dixon line, note that Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri still permitted slavery.)

4. Review with students -- in lecture, discussion, or question-and-answer session -- the legalization of slavery through the Constitution and subsequent acts of Congress.

5. As a culminating activity, allow students in small groups to generate hypotheses as to what might have been the extent of sectional tension among the North, South, and West had slavery not been so institutionalized.