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This abstract of the Census from 1830 not only provides numbers, state by state, of free and enslaved persons – but students will note that there are enslaved persons in many of the states they consider “free” (sample pages at left).

Note that the terminology is historically accurate but might be offensive to students unless context is provided (this will be true for many of the documents from this era).

Nat Turner’s Rebellion led to both public debate and a tightening of laws and policies. “Nat Turner was an enslaved man who had learned to read and write and become a religious leader despite his enslavement; following what he took to be religious signs, he led other enslaved people in an armed uprising. The violence of the uprising and Turner’s ability to escape and hide for approximately six weeks following the event led to changes in laws and policies and also led to a widespread climate of fear among white slaveholders. Enslaved people in far-flung states who had no connection to the event were lynched by white mobs. The State of Virginia briefly considered ending the practice of slavery in the wake of the rebellion, but they ultimately decided instead to tighten the laws of slavery.

While the Trail of Tears and “Indian Removal Act” are not central to understanding slavery, they are critical events in the history of the country in this era; in addition, the concept of “indian removal” connects directly to tensions that rose as the nation expanded in both population and territory.

As the United States acquired Western territories, and as the power battle between slaveholding and free states continued, the land on which Native nations lived became increasingly valuable. After President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee nations were forced to move from their land, most often on foot and with the deaths of many people, into Western territories. The 1838 forced removal of the Cherokee people from their Georgia land led to the deaths of thousands of people (exact numbers are unknown, but estimates range around 4,000 - 5,000.)

“On May 26, 1836, the House of Representatives adopted a ‘Gag Rule’ stating that all petitions regarding slavery would be tabled without being read, referred, or printed….The enactment of the Gag Rule, rather than discouraging petitioners, energized the anti-slavery movement to flood the Capitol with written demands. Activists held up the suppression of debate as an example of the slaveholding South’s infringement of the rights of all Americans.”

As the nation expanded Westward, tensions rose further over whether new states and territories would permit or prohibit slavery.

“The pact set a border between Texas and Mexico and ceded California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to the United States. …the acquisition of so much territory with the issue of slavery unresolved lit the fuse that eventually set off the Civil War in 1861.”

Students would benefit from reading an excerpt of the text of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – but in addition, the cover itself is an interesting artifact, and students can discuss its details and its possible impact upon publication in 1845. (See also text in this chart, below, from Frederick Douglass’ July 4 address in 1852.)

As new states were added to the nation, the question of how many would permit slavery and how many would prohibit it – and, therefore, which faction had more power – continued to contribute to growing tension.

This map has a range of valuable information, not only about Presidential politics, but also about population statistics and slavery. It makes a particular point of comparison with the 1830 Census, hyperlinked above in this chart.

See above; understanding the life and words of Sojourner Truth helps students to understand the complexity and intersectionality of both the women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement.

“The years of 1854-1861 were a turbulent time in Kansas territory. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 …allowed the residents of these territories to decide by popular vote whether their state would be free or slave. This concept of self-determination was called popular sovereignty'. …Three distinct political groups occupied Kansas: pro-slavers, free-staters and abolitionists. Violence broke out immediately between these opposing factions and continued until 1861 when Kansas entered the Union as a free state on January 29th. This era became forever known as ‘Bleeding Kansas’.” (National Park Service, link at right.)

This photograph pairs with the text in the row below from the Women’s Rights Convention of 1853, when Sojourner Truth spoke to the group.

The Women’s Rights Convention: The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is a significant event in the fight for women’s rights and for women’s suffrage, though activists at the convention itself debated whether suffrage should be the center point of their platform. In addition, the Seneca Falls Convention is now widely understood to represent some tension between the women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement; some activists at the time felt that the right to vote should not go to black men before white women. In this collection of documents, Sojourner Truth’s speech to a smaller, subsequent convention – one held in New York in 1853 – is included, largely because of the critical role Sojourner Truth plays in demonstrating the importance of the intersectionality of both the women’s rights and abolitionist movements.

President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830. This law granted the President the ability to exchange land west of the Mississippi for Indigenous territories within the boundaries of existing states. An additional act was passed in 1834. This act designated land, including what would later become the state of Oklahoma, as Indian Territory. As a result of the precedent set by these acts, over sixty tribes were either willingly or forcibly removed from their lands over the next fifty years.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum explains: “Catlin mistranslated Ah-jon-jon, whose name means ‘The Light,’ as ‘Pigeon's Egg Head.’ The Light was an Assiniboine leader who was invited in 1831 to represent his tribe in Washington. During a winter in the nation's capital, he traded his native dress for European clothes and customs. In Catlin's before-and-after portrait, the once proud warrior, with a liquor bottle in his pocket, swaggers in high-heeled boots and carries a fan and umbrella. For Catlin, this transformation illustrated the tragic gulf between Native American and white cultures.”

In 1835, in the “Treaty of New Echota,” a group of Cherokees – without consent of the majority of their nation – agreed that the Cherokee people would move West and vacate their land. This letter, a protest against the Treaty, was sent by Chief John Ross and other Cherokee leaders to Congress in an effort to declare that treaty invalid.

During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly marched from their lands. Known as the “Trail of Tears,” this forced removal resulted in the deaths of thousands of Cherokee. The Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Seminole also were forced to travel along the trail of tears.

In 1839, the enslaved people aboard the Amistad were captured by Portuguese slave traders in Sierra Leone, and they were being taken to a Caribbean plantation. The enslaved Africans seized control of the ship, killed two of their captors, and ordered the ship to sail to Africa, but it was seized off of the coast of Long Island and the enslaved Africans were brought to trial in Connecticut. As the National Archives explains, “Had it not been for the actions of abolitionists in the United States, the issues related to the Amistad might have ended quietly in an admiralty court. But they used the incident as a way to expose the evils of slavery and generate significant opposition to the practice.” In an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, John Quincy Adams “passionately and eloquently defended the Africans' right to freedom on both legal and moral grounds, referring to treaties prohibiting the slave trade and to the Declaration of Independence. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the Africans, stating that they were free individuals.”

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo held a direct correlation to westward movement and migration. Americans forged west with the discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill in California which was the first major gold rush in the United States. By the following year, tens of thousands of “forty-niners” had come to the area in hopes of striking it rich. Most did not become wealthy in California, but many stayed there. The region continued to grow rapidly, and, in 1850, California became a state. With the expansion of available land and the gold rush, people from all over the USA and the world came and new businesses developed, including the pony express, transcontinental railroad jobs, Chinese laundry, the cattle industry, and free and enslaved Africans seeking freedom.

The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850, a series of laws designed to ease sectional tensions between the North and South. The law benefitted southern enslavers by requiring northern law enforcement to assist in capturing and returning enslaved persons who had run away from their enslavers. Southern bounty hunters were also permitted to operate in the North. The law put both enslaved and free Blacks at risk. After the law was passed, thousands of freedom seekers attempted to escape to free states in the North and Canada as well, where they would be beyond the reach of the law.

During the peak of the Gold Rush, over 20,000 Chinese men immigrated to the United States to mine gold in California. Chinese immigrant labor contributed significantly to not only the mining industry, but also the expansion of the national railroad and the development of services supporting laborers. Nonetheless, xenophobic, anti-Chinese sentiment rose in California and nationally, ultimately leading to both the Chinese Massacre of 1871 (in which a violent mob lynched 18 Chinese men) and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

This book, The Fugitive Slave Law and its Victims, published in 1861, was an antislavery text, arguing for the abolition of slavery by providing accounts of the Fugitive Slave Laws’ effects and victims. The book was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York.-

Popular images and music from the former Confederate states during Reconstruction created the image of the Northern “carpetbagger,” a derogatory term for an opportunistic outsider who has arrived from the Northern states to exploit the Southern states out of self-interest and greed.

Images like this one helped to portray the West as vast, unpopulated, uncharted territory ready for U.S. expansion.

According to the Digital Public Library of America, “Benjamin Singleton established the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association to help organize travel and settlement for African Americans departing Tennessee for Kansas.” Singleton was a formerly enslaved man who escaped to freedom in 1846, and he helped to organize the migration of approximately 300 African Americans to Kansas in 1877 - 1878. These migrants were not only seeking opportunity, but they were also fleeing the racial violence of white supremacists.

The United States Government policies and practices of Indian removal forced multiple indigenous nations Westward, off of their land and into smaller, isolated reservations in the Western territories and states.

According to the Library of Congress, this chart was “prepared by [W.E.B.] Du Bois for the Negro Exhibit of the American Section at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 to show the economic and social progress of African Americans since emancipation.”

In the early nineteenth century, many people left their home countries seeking a better life in the United States, perceived to be a land of opportunity and wealth. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that nearly 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States from Germany, Ireland, and England. In the 1900s immigrants from Italy arrived in large numbers.

While immigrants often came seeking a better life or escape from oppression and economic hardship, Immigrants faced many challenges in the United States. Lack of jobs and discrimination posed barriers to many immigrant communities and many faced pressures of assimilation and hostility.

Throughout shifting immigration policies over the course of American history, there is also an ongoing debate about how best to assimilate new Americans.  According to the Library of Congress, “though nativists may have abhorred the increasing ethnic diversity in the United States, others saw the opportunity to steep newcomers in American traditions. With four million Americans of Irish descent, hundreds of thousands of Jewish Americans with strong ties to Eastern Europe, and ten million citizens hailing from nations aligned with the Central Powers, organizations like the New York National Americanization Day Committee hoped to use patriotic holidays such as the Fourth of July as a means to unify the country's diverse populations.”

During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported from the United States to Mexico. As unemployment increased during the 1930s, white Americans viewed Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans as competition for scarce agricultural jobs and resources. In response, many local and state governments, often with the federal government's support, initiated a program of repatriating immigrants to Mexico. Some Mexicans, many of whom were recruited as farmworkers in the 1910s and 1920s, were offered free train rides to the border. In addition, Mexican Americans were coerced into giving up their jobs and land, forcing them to move to Mexico or find work elsewhere in the United States.

Between 1936 and 1967, The Green Book was published annually for African Americans traveling throughout the United States and North America. The Green Book’s original author, Victor Hugo Green, intended for the publication to act as a travel guide for African Americans during the Jim Crow Era, when laws prohibited many establishments from offering service to Black patrons. The Green Book offered suggestions to travelers seeking places and businesses which were safe for African Americans and which would treat Black patrons with dignity.

During the 1930s, the fallout from the Great Depression and environmental disaster struck the Great Plains region of the United States. Severe drought and resulting dust storms rendered the land in the Great Plains unfit for farming. Due to the drastic loss of jobs and income as well as the overwhelming amount of dust, which made living conditions unsafe and unbearable, millions of people left the Great Plains and headed west to California. Migrants faced a long and often dangerous journey to California as well as discrimination once they arrived.

Dorothea Lange, a photographer whose work was funded by the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, documented struggling workers during the Great Depression.  In this photograph, a Mexican family seeks work in the fields of California.

As a response to increasing anti-Japanese sentiment after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Using national security as a justification, the order called for the relocation of persons of Japanese descent living in the United States. The newly formed War Relocation Authority moved nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were citizens, to “relocation centers”, most of which were located throughout the West.

The Japanese Americans who were affected by the Civilian Exclusion Order were given little time to leave their homes and dispose of their property before being transported from assembly centers to more permanent relocation centers.

While they were not required to work, the movement of the incarcerated Japanese Americans was limited by barbed wire and guard towers.