Description
A discussion of the very rapid growth of the early United States; Its economic dynamism, political development, population growth and its immense territorial expansion. Also, how we simultaneously grew, in symbiosis, as a slave society and how, following on this, our new Constitution sanctioned slavery. Then how this system so heavily impacted and actually controlled much of our history and, almost from the beginning, created an increasingly bitter, relentless and unresolvable controversy. We’ll look at slavery’s direct relation to the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico that resulted from it, and the chasm between pro and anti-slavery advocates that grew over the territories we took from Mexico. Whether they would be “slave” or “free.” We will follow how these increasingly divisive arguments led to secession and the Civil War. We will conclude with the war’s aftermath: Reconstruction and its collapse, the creation of the three “Civil War amendments,” the resumption of white supremacist control in the South and the creation of the Jim Crow regime that led to the effective re-subjugation of the four million newly freed people.
