One of the things that students need to understand is that nothing is inevitable. Everything happens because certain people make certain choices that affect the outcome of situations. Nothing just happens to be the way that it is. There are two types of people. There are passive people who don’t act on anything and there are active people who are constantly making decisions. Nothing is inevitable because people make choices and those choices affect outcomes. Even if a person is passive they made the choice to act that way. People make their own choices on whether to act or sit back and do nothing.

This concept that nothing is inevitable can be worked into almost any history lesson plan. I want to teach it using slavery as an example. Slavery is something that has always been a part of history. Many people have been put into slavery over time. One of the things that made American slavery so different was that a whole group of people, with similar genetic make-ups were now being confined to the institution of slavery. Slavery was not inevitable for theses people. The slaves along with the white men made choices that affected the outcome of slavery.

Many slaves came from Africa where they had been captured and put on ships to be sent to America. The Africans did not just walk on the ships and be carried off. They made choices, which led them to being captured. One of these choices was to help the white men capture the slaves. The Africans living along the coastline practiced tribalism. They separated their tribe from the other tribes and made deals with the white men to go into the interior of Africa and capture members of other tribes for them. The white men could not go into the interiors of Africa because of the fear of catching malaria. This turned out to be a mistake for the Africans because it kept the tribes from unifying against the white men. The coastal tribes a made choice to help the white men and eventually it would affect them as well and they too would be captured and sent to the market. If tribalism had not occurred then there may not have been as many slaves captured and forced into slavery.

Of course the Africans were not the only ones who made choices about slavery. The white men in America made choices as well. One of the most important involving the institution of slavery were the decisions that were made at the Constitutional Convention or the ones that were not made. The founders agonized over whether or not to make slavery legal or to free them all. They came up with the three-fifths compromise. They also decided that when a slave state wanted to enter into the union a free state must enter in at the same time. They made these choices knowing that if they did not then the southern states would not sign the constitution and Britain would come back and take over. These choices that were made affected the institution of slavery in the United States greatly and would later lead to more problems and the start of the Civil War.

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