Last two days of class 11/28 and 11/29

On Wednesday, 11/28, we talked about the election between Abe Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. We watched a short video on a reenactment of the election and it showed how the elections had each candidate give a speech before dinner, then allowed all families to go home and discuss the different candidates, then come back at night and have each man make counter points to the earlier delivered speeches. After watching and talking about the video i learned that Douglas was pretty much all for slavery, and the expansion of it West. I also learned something that i had never known before, and that was that Lincoln didn't necessarily believe all slaves should be free and equal to whites, he supported more of the idea that they should be given natural rights; life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Lincoln thought they should be given those rights but still shouldn't be allowed to be as socially high as the whites were. And today in class we watched a video on the Raid at Harper's Ferry. This was about a man, John Brown, who basically led 21 men into Harper's Ferry in Virginia and eventually his men got either killed, captured, or escaped and he ended up getting hanged. From today's class I learned that one of John Brown's men, an old slave had his ears chopped off and kept as souvenirs by one of the citizens! For somebody to have the hatred to actually do something like that really does amaze me and it goes to show how different times really were back then.