This week, a discussion on how the Civil War tested the limits of the U.S. Constitution.

Penn State Professor Rachel Sheldon explains.

One of the wonderful things about Abraham Lincoln is his ability to sort of capture all

of the key points of what's going on in that particular moment, both sort of in general terms, but also

constitutionally. More with Professor Rachel Sheldon of Penn State in a moment.

So up to this point in the course, we've been talking a lot about the degree to which the

Constitution did not simply take the form of a written legal

document, but rather as a set of ideas about the structure and function of American governance.

And among these key ideas was a reliance on union, particularly those mutual bonds of nationhood between states, often known as

comedy, and the production of compromise, right? The Constitution is a commitment to compromise.

And because compromise was baked into the Constitution, so too was the evil of slavery, because

there were consistently compromises between slaveholding

and non-slaveholding states about slavery. Because the framers at the Constitutional Convention

in Philadelphia were so committed to the idea of compromise as part of the scaffolding of American governance,

they had drawn a path forward that always was going to accommodate slavery, particularly

as the nation became more and more committed to slavery. So over the course of the 1850s,

you will remember there were lots of compromises over slavery.

There was the compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

In some ways, Dred Scott is considered a compromise what else happened in Kansas.

But this all leaves neither side fully satisfied, right?

Northerners are unhappy.

Southerners are unhappy. And so by the late 1850s,

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