"Fire" Topic

"From 1791(Vermont) to 1861 (Kansas) the United States added twenty-one states to the original thirteen. With equal representation of each state in the Senate, the issue of slavery dogged each admission of a new state with a constant need to balance equally the number of slave vs free states. The Northwest Ordnance (1787) and Southwest Ordnance (1790) divided the country into free and slave states, the line along which the two sections would later battle. The Constitution of 1789 provided for admission of new states under the jurisdiction of the Congress, without consent of state legislatures. At first rapid expansion allowed the addition of new states carved out of existing states or formed from newly created territories, the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Treaty of Ghent after the War of 1812. But then a series of crises occurred during the later antebellum period when balancing new free and slave states became more difficult. The compromises reached after each crisis averted the ultimate crisis of the Civil War for a time. The Missouri Compromise (1820), The Compromise of 1850. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) was the last flawed compromise which, together with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 led to the Civil War. Kansas was admitted to the Union in January 1861 as a free state in the midst of the secession of the Confederate States. Nebraska was not admitted until 1867. With the election of Lincoln and Republican control of a shrunken Congress, the approach to admission of new states fundamentally changed. No longer would there be any attempt at balancing free and slave states. In June 1862 the practice of slavery was forbidden in all new states to be formed from the western territories, though the Lincoln administration did not try to end slavery in border states still in the Union nor in the seceded Confederate States until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. In June 1863 West Virginia, consisting of loyalist counties in northwest Virginia, was formed as the thirty-fifth state. Admission of various states formed out of western territories was debated and the first new state added was Nevada in October 1864, the second and last state admitted during the Civil War. The Republican's Civil War approach to creating territories and then new states from the territories was followed from the admission of Nebraska in 1867 to Arizona in 1912. The last two states admitted, Alaska and Hawaii in 1959 were created as a result of the unique circumstances of the Alaska purchase and the Second World War. The current map of the United States owes much of its shape to the run up, processes and outcomes of the Civil War…"

ESSENTIAL CIVIL WAR CURRICULUM

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Armand

One of the interesting things about Nevada is that it was entered as a state illegally in 1864, AND, it's the only state in the Union that has a clause in it's state constitution prohibiting it from seceding from the Union.

Thanks

Armand