As I missed this class period, I had to do my research alone this time. I am a member of group 3 meaning the topic we received was topic 2. The key words for this topic are: man, men, slavery, people, race, colored, white, free, states, god, negro, great, country, slave, black, state, slaves, government, law, and liberty.
My first thoughts after seeing the words above were that the main focus of the topic was going to be something about the civil war in America. The key words include race, free, liberty, law, slavery, and country which all lead me to believe the topic focuses on the argument in America which turned into the civil war. To test this hypothesis, I looked into a couple topics that included the words I mentioned above. In doing this research, I found that with the exception of maybe one, all of those words are used similar amounts of times in each article. They are also all used with each other in almost every one of the items in the topic. This primary research led me to believe that my hypothesis may indeed be correct as these words can all apply to the civil war and abolishment of slavery. The data I looked into for this initial research can be seen in the link pasted below.
https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=faaf69de8612d7f6c97782e5e3f5fee5
Once this research was complete, I wanted to make sure that I was completely correct about the topic my group was supposed to look at. To go further into research, I decided to read into one of the original texts that was provided for my topic to investigate what it may be about. In this research, I was a bit surprised to read the first article and find out that this was a man explaining his time as a slave and new following of christianity. As this may still be evidence towards my hypothesis because this is a freed slave writing about the past, it does not give full evidence that the topic I believed it to be was correct. This item did not mention anything about a war so I wanted to go even further to make sure I was correct.
My next idea for research was to check another one of the sources I was given to see if I could find any more information that could help me. In doing so, I read about a man giving evidence in front of the Committee of the House of Commons. He spoke about how slavery is the most extensive and extraordinary crime system the world has ever witnessed, and people continue to do it without any legal issue. He goes on to call slavery a “hateful system involving a most incalculable amount of evil, and entailing a measure of misery on one hand, and guilt on the other.” This information helped me to prove my hypothesis true as this man was part of a debate to abolish slavery in the United States. I feel as though my original hypothesis was correct as the data I found and show here talks about the abolishment of slavery.