Joshua Giddings Thesis

Fifteen days after the initial submission of the Kansas-Nebraska act to Congress, the Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States (Appeal of the Independent Democrats) was issued (Chase). This manifesto was meant to comment on the constitutionality as well as validity of the Kansas-Nebraska act. It is obvious in its statements against the proposed bill: “We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part… of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, emigrants… and free laborers… and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves. The Appeal of the Independent Democrats was signed by the senators and most of the House Representatives from Ohio, one of them being Representative Joshua Giddings, who also co-authored it along with Salmon P. Chase, then the senator. This is just one of many supports for the fact that Joshua Reed Giddings was strongly, one could even argue violently, opposed to the passage of this act. It went against everything that Giddings stood for. The passing of the Kansas-Nebraska act would mean that new territories would be completely open to …show more content…
(Stewart) Before the end of the year his parents, Joshua and Elizabeth Pease Giddings, moved to Canandaigua, New York. When Giddings was 10, they moved again, this time to Ohio, where he finished his basic schooling. Ohio, at the time, was “in a wilderness state. Hard and continuous labor was necessary to put it in habitable shape… [Giddings] was made to suffer the burdens and inconveniences of poverty.” (Long 7) When he was just seventeen years old, he enlisted to serve in the War of 1812, even though he was under suitable age. Out of his whole company, he was one of thirty-seven men who survived from the first battle of the war. Two years later, he returned