Kids In Charge

During the first week of December, History Class was run by the students. There was warning and there were plans for us to follow, but it still felt exciting. I really felt the pressure to meet the deadlines we had set out for ourselves because at the end of class, it was our job to report back to our teacher on what we had done via Google Docs. Our main project during was ironically on early Democracy in America. (I say ironically because the situation we experienced was a bit like an unstable democracy.) Our essential questions were: how should we define democracy and how democratic was the United States in the early 1800s.

Using the internet, we found out the dictionary definition of democracy and then put it in our own words. I said a democracy was a government where all the people in the country participate. In the activator we examined The County Election, a painting done in 1852 by George Caleb Bingham. In the depiction of early voting in Midwest America, there are several examples of questionable goings-on. Firstly, people are casting their ballots while drunk, and then before they can vote they are asked by a judge to swear they have not voted anywhere else. The voters could be lying, and perhaps they have voted in multiple other towns, the system is not yet set up so that it is honest. There is not even a way to tell if the votes are being counted correctly. The painting shows a place that is not a democracy, but instead a poor imitation of one. We looked at four other sources besides the painting to see other perspectives of the early democracy. One was a chart comparing the number of people who met the voting requirement and the number of states in the country over 65 years. The third source was another chart, this time displaying how the states were voting, either by people or legislature. Next was my favorite: two quotes, one from Benjamin Franklin and the other from Norton Townshend which called American Democracy illogical and not actually a democracy. The last source was on the Dorr War, which was a revolt in 1834 led by Thomas Dorr who called for a new constitution and an end to voting restrictions. To prove our knowledge of Early Democracy in America, we poured all our knowledge into a poster, the one seen below.

Pictography 

Bingham, George Caleb. The County Election, 1852. Oil on Canvas. Courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum and the Early 19th Centry Realism collection on www.kingsacademy.com