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On March 3, 1820, the decisive votes in the House admitted Maine as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and made free soil all western territories north of Missouri's southern border.
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Nat Turner destroyed the white Southern myth that slaves were actually happy with their lives or too docile to undertake a violent rebellion. His revolt hardened proslavery attitudes among Southern whites and led to new oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of slaves.
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The Mexican-American War was a conflict between the United States and Mexico, fought from April 1846 to February 1848. It stemmed from the annexation of the Republic of Texas by the U.S. in 1845 and from a dispute over whether Texas ended at the Nueces River (the Mexican claim) or the Rio Grande (the U.S. claim). -
Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions on January 29, 1850, in an attempt to seek a compromise and avert a crisis between North and South. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin uses the North to represent freedom and the South to represent slavery and oppression. The other story is a slavery narrative, chronicling Uncle Tom's descent into increasingly worse states of oppression. -
It became law on May 30, 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, created two new territories, and allowed for popular sovereignty. -
Bleeding Kansas was a mini civil war between pro- and anti-slavery forces that occurred in Kansas from 1856 to 1865. -
The Caning of Charles Sumner, or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate chamber, 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. -
The Dred Scott decision was the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on March 6, 1857, that having lived in a free state and territory did not entitle an slaved person, Dred Scott, to his freedom. In essence, the decision argued that, as someone's property, Scott was not a citizen and could not sue in a federal court. -
Lincoln-Douglas debates, series of seven debates between the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, largely concerning the issue of slavery extension into the territories. -
The Election of 1860 demonstrated the divisions within the United States just before the Civil War. The election was unusual because four strong candidates competed for the presidency. The Constitutional Union Party was also new; 1860 was the first and only time the party ran a candidate for president.