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The push to end all slavery in the United States. The people who pushed for the end of slavery were called abolitionists. The South was very against abolitionism because that is what their economy was based on. This created tension between the North and South.
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Westward Expansion is the push westward to gain more American territory. By doing this lots of Native Americans who already inhabited the area were pushed out of their homes or killed. The reason for moving westward is that too many people were immigrating to America and they need enough space to live, the Americans also wanted more territory to prove their dominance over other countries. This helped all of America come to what it is today.
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During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, state delegates reached the Three-Fifths Compromise. When determining a state's total population and taxation, they decided that three out of every five slaves were to be counted. To dismiss the argument between slave states and free states. Before the Civil War, the Three-Fifths Compromise gave slave states the upper hand in the House of Representatives because they had a bigger slave population than the North. -
The southern states argued that there was no law about slavery in the Constitution but the North and the federal government disagreed. The South said that the federal government was taking away the state's individual power. This created a division between the North and South. -
The Underground Railroad was a path that slaves that wanted to get to a free state or even to Canada took to escape their harsh lives as slaves. Around 100,000 slaves were freed using the Underground Railroad and continued their lives in the North/free states. It was a hard journey lots of slaves died from starvation, dehydration, and lots of slave catchers were traveling along the path. This is one of the many parts that slaves played in the Civil War.
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To avoid disrupting the nation's balance of slave and free states, this legislation admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state at the same time. It also banned slavery above 36º 30º latitude in the remaining part of Louisiana Territory. The South thought that this was unfair because the land north of the line had more land. -
This was after the US gained the states from the Mexican Cession. The act called for California to be admitted into the United States as a free state and established territorial control for Utah and New Mexico. And set a border between Texas and the United States, for an end to the slave trade in Washington, DC. It also modified the Fugitive Slave Act which helped the South gain more slaves to improve their economy. -
A law that states that all slaves need to be returned to their owners even if they were living in a free state at that time. The law also required the federal government to be responsible for finding, capturing, and returning slaves to their rightful owners. This made sure that all slaves trying to escape the South and got caught were returned to their owners, which made the South lose far fewer slaves. -
The Emancipation Proclamation stated that all slaves in the slave states were to be freed immediately. Unfortunately, it actually did not free most of the slaves, but it did pave the way and say that this is the future that we need to live in. Lots of southern states were against this which continued tensions throughout the civil war.