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The Wilmot Proviso was issued on August 8th, 1846 by Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman David Wilmot. It prohibited the expansion of slavery into any territory acquired by the United States from Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American War settlement.
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The abolitionist movement was the social and political effort to end slavery everywhere. Fueled in part by religious fervor, the movement was led by people like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and John Brown
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The compromise of 1850 which allowed the admission of California as a state greatly increased sectional conflict. In return for the admission of an extra free state the slave state got a much stronger fugitive slave act, and the removal of the barrier to slavery north of the Madison Dixon Line
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The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850 that defused a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired in the Mexican American War.
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Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War
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The Missouri Compromise was United States federal legislation that admitted Maine to the United States as a free state, simultaneously with Missouri as a slave state, thus maintaining the balance of power between North and South in the US Senate
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The Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 was a territorial organic act that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. It was drafted by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas, passed by the 33rd United States Congress, and signed into law by President Franklin Pierce
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Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, United States, between 1854 and 1859 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas
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The Caning of Charles Sumner, or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts, in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely criticized slaveholders, including a relative of Brooks.
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Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 19 How. 393 (1857), often referred to as the Dred Scott decision, was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court in which the Court held that the US Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for black people, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and so the rights and privileges that the Constitution confers upon American citizens could not apply to them
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John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was an effort by abolitionist John Brown, from October 16 to 18, 1859, to initiate a slave revolt in Southern states by taking over the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. It has been called the dress rehearsal for or Tragic Prelude to the Civil War
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The 1860 United States presidential election was the 19th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on November 6, 1860. In a four-way contest, the Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin emerged triumphant. Lincoln's election served as the primary catalyst of the American Civil War