The term elephant in the room is a phrase that means that there is a completely obvious topic that people who are discussing something completely ignore. We know that slavery was the elephant in the room for American politics because the politicians know that the north and the south have completely different views on slavery so they think that a major fight would no doubtfully break out if they would ever bring up slavery while in discussion. While learning about the many events that lead up to the civil war, a common term that came up a lot was that the war was inevitable. It clearly was, so the American politicians avoided talking about slaves while in discusson. This means that the politicians knew that the civil war was completely inevitable.
The Missouri compromise was a huge part of the civil war. The compromise created an even split of 11 slave states and 11 free sates. California requested to join the union as a free state. This messes up the whole north and south trend that was going on because California is far west. California was able to become a free state thanks to The Compromise of 1850. The compromise is a 5-part compromise created by a man named Henry Clay. He anticipated the inevitable controversy of the loss of balance between slave and free states. In the compromise, it says that slave trade will be abolished in DC buy you could still own slaves buy you can't buy or sell them. A rising problem that occurred. A part of the compromise was the Fugitive Slave Law. This law state that if any citizen was to find a runaway slave, they would have to turn them in. Making them assist the recovery of fugitive slaves. The compromise of 1850 did what it was suppose to do, which was to keep the nation united. You could tell that they knew that the civil war was coming, so Henry Clay created it so that it would settle any negative inner turmoil that was brewing in America.
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska act came rolling around. The act made the Missouri Compromise line meaningless because there was now open land for slave states to settle. The act allowed white males in those territories to decide whether or not the land would be free through popular opinion. The act pleased the southerners because they could move into the land and claim it as slave land. They could also expand both west and north. Chicago was the hub of transportation and commerce because the city was were the railroad began. The northerners were happy with the new railroads because they could easily access the west for trade and sales.
In 1856, the Bleeding Kansas occurred. Bleeding Kansas is the term that represents the acts of violence during the settling of Kansas. Because the Kansas-Nebraska created either pro-slavery, or free state territories by the popular sovereignty, pro-slavery and antislavery settlers came rushing in to try to influence the decision on whether the territory should be free or not. Abolitionist John Brown and a band of other abolitionists massacre five pro-slavery settler on the night of may 24th. This created an uproar and people did not know what to do about it. Brown's actions created more acts of violence to occur.
Since slavery was never really discussed and figured out, all these events had to happen. All of these actions came together and finally led to all out war which was the Civil War. If slavery was never the "elephant in the room" then maybe the war would of never of happened. To answer the essentail question, we know that slavery was the Elelephant in Room because we knew that the politicians expected a war to happen, so they created acts and laws to try to settle an tensions that might have hinted towards a war to break out.
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