James Monroe on Slave Trade
1) Provide a summary of the historical context (background) that is relevant to the source you picked. Use the information provided in the lesson and the information about the source to craft your summary. Be sure to use your own words. (Note that rearranging the order of words or changing a word here or there does not make a sentence one’s own. See Avoiding Plagiarism for more detail.)
2) Who wrote the source, when, where, and why?
3) Analyze the source. What did the author say? How does the historical context help you to critique or better understand what the source is saying? Consider the source’s perspective.
4) Draw conclusions: What information can we learn by looking at the primary source within historical context? (Keep in mind that we are only using one primary source – one piece of a much larger puzzle – so keep the conclusions limited to what we can learn from analyzing the source within context.)
Source picked:
James Monroe on Slave Trade: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=202
Sample Solution
Slavery was ingrained in the fabric of the early United States and was central to the operation of Highland. James Monroe supported colonization as a means of gradually reducing and ultimately abolishing slavery in the United States. Monroe was a nationalist, primarily concerned about preserving the republic. He recognized that slavery fostered sectional animosity, and these tensions were a persistent threat to a rather delicate Union. He believed that abolishing slavery was probably necessary to ensure the survival of the country. On March 6, 1820, President James Monroe signs the Missouri Compromise, also known as the Compromise Bill of 1820, into law. The bill attempted to equalize the number of slave-holding states and free states in the country, allowing Missouri into the Union as a slave state while Maine joined as a free state.
