- Discuss the conflicts created by the Mexican
War acquisitions and explain how the Compromise of 1850 tried to resolve them.
The focus might be on the extreme delicacy of the sectional adjustment.
REFERENCE: David Potter, The
Impending Crisis, 1848 - 1861 (1976).
- Assess the breakup of the second two-party
system in relation to the slavery controversy. Show how the Whig demise and
Democratic divisions paved the way for the Republicans.
REFERENCE: Bruce Levine, Half
Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War (1992).
- Show the connection between the proslavery
expansionist schemes, particularly the Cuban affair and the Gadsden Purchase,
and the sectional controversy. Emphasize southern hopes and northern fears
of potential slavery expansion to the Caribbean or Central America.
REFERENCE: Robert May, The
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire (1973).
- Examine the Kansas-Nebraska Act and explain
why it aroused such wrath in the North. Particular attention might be paid
to the railroad-promoting Douglas, with his theory of popular sovereignty,
and to the rise of the free soil ideology in the North.
REFERENCE: Richard Sewell, A
House Divided (1988).
