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The 3/5 compromise was added to the constitution to determine respresentation in the House Of Representatives,slaves equaled 3/5 of a person.This shows sectionalism over slavery and the concern of which side has power iin the government.
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New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania forbid their citizens from participating in the slave trade.
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Eli Whitney’s invention revolutionises cotton production in the South, eventually leading to cotton succeeding tobacco as the most profitable trade commodity in the United States.
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The western territories, a vast expanse of land stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, are acquired by the United States from France for over eleven million dollars. Several decades of debate and compromise over slavery’s expansion westwards follow.
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The internal trade grows as Northern owners sell their slaves, creating what historians have labelled a ‘Second Middle Passage’ within America
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Since the beginning of the nineteenth-century, the political balance between North and South had been maintained by admitting alternately slave and free states.
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Congress is denied interference in the slave trade between states, enabling Southern slave-owners to take free blacks from the North. The act galvanises abolitionists as it implicated free states in maintaining the slave system by including clauses that meant anyone aiding runaway slaves would be subject to fines and imprisonment.
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ohn Brown attempts to lead an armed slave insurrection by seizing a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He believed slavery could only be ended by violent means
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Abraham Lincoln, who had declared "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free..." is elected president, the first Republican, receiving 180 of 303 possible electoral votes and 40 percent of the popular vote.
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Lincoln calls for peace with the erring seceding states, stating that 'though passions may have strained' the North and South 'must not be enemies' but friends. Appealing to 'the better angels of our nature' in an attempt to pacify growing concerns about possible conflict, he declares, 'I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists'.
