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Wilmot Proviso
A bill that outlawed slavery in any territory the United States might acquire from the War with Mexico. -
Compromise of 1850
The plan was to please the North, Coalifornia would be admitted as a free state, and the slave trade would be abolished in Washington, D.C. Also to please the South, Congress would not pass laws regarding slavery for the rest of the territories won from Mexico, and Congress would pass a stronger law to help slaveholders. -
Fugitive Slave Act
Under this law, accused fugitives could be held without an arrest warrant. They had a no right to a jury trial. Instead, a federal commissioner ruled on each case. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin
In 1852, this novel presented the cruelty and immorality of slavery. The novel descirbes the escape of a slave named Eliza and her baby across the Ohio River. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
In 1854, Senator Douglas drafted a bill to organize the Nebraska Territory. It proposed to divide the territory into parts Nebraska and Kansas. It also allowed residents of the new territory to vote either for or against slavery. -
Formation of Republican Party
Southern Whigs supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Northern Whigs didn't. Then the Whig Party split into two factions, Republican and Democratic. Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery. -
Bleeding Kansas
John Brown, an extreme abolitionist, led seven other men in a massacre of five of his proslavery neighbors. This attack is known as the Potawatomie Massacre, after the creek near where the victims were found. As news of the violence spread, civil war broke out in Kansas. It continued for three years and the territory came to be called "Bleeding Kansas." -
Dred Scott Case
Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri. But for a period of his life he had lived in free territory before being taken back to Missouri. Scott sued for his freedom and his case reached the Supreme Court in 1856. But in 1857 the Court ruled against Scott and said that he could not sue in U.S. courts because he was not treated as a U.S citizen. -
Caning of Charles Sumner
In May 1856, Senator Charles Sumner spoke against the proslavery forces in Kansas. In his speech, Sumner insulted A.P. Butler, a senator from South Carolina. But Preston Brooks, who was a relative of Butler, heard about Sumner's speech and attacked Sumner at his own desk in Congress, as he beat him unconscious with his cane. -
Attack on Harper's Ferry
John Brown wanted to provoke a slave uprising. To do this he planned to capture the weapons in the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown and 18 followers captured the Harpers Ferry arsenal. U.S. marines attacked Brown, as some of his men escaped, but he and six others were captured, and ten men were killed. -
Election of 1860
The Democratic Party was split into Northerners who wanted the platform to support popular sovereignty as a way of decideing whether a territory became a free state or a free state, as the Southerners completely opposed. The Northerners won the platform vote, and they chose Stephen A, Douglas as their candidate, who would take on Abraham Lincoln for the Republicans, John Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats, and John Bell for the Constitutional Union Party. Lincoln won North, Breckinridge S. -
Secession
Before the election, Southerners had warned that if Lincoln won the presidency, Southern states would secede from the Union. Eleven slave states confirmed their secession from the U.S. and started the Confederate States of America.
