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The Underground Railroad was neither underground nor a railroad. The Underground Railroad was the term used to describe a network of persons who helped escaped slaves on their way to freedom in the northern states or Canada. Click here!
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Eli Whitney patented the Cotton Gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. Click here!
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The Missouri Compromise was an effort by Congress to defuse the sectional and political rivalries.
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The Wilmot Proviso proposed an American law to ban slavery in territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War. Click here!
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The Compromise of 1850 consisted of laws admitting California as a free state, creating Utah and New Mexico territories with the question of slavery in each to be determined by popular sovereignty.
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The Kansas-Nebraska Act was an 1854 bill that mandated “popular sovereignty," allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders.
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'Bleeding Kansas' is the term used to described the period of violence during the settling of the Kansas territory.
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The United States Supreme Court issues a decision in the Dred Scott case, affirming the right of slave owners to take their slaves into the Western territories.
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In the month of October, 1859, the U.S. military arsenal at Harper's Ferry was the target of an assault by an armed band of abolitionists led by John Brown.
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Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated Southern Democrat John Breckinridge, Democrat Stephen Douglas, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell.
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Fort Sumter is an island fortification located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Fort Sumter is most famous for being the site of the first shots of the Civil War. Click here!
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The Confederate States of America consisted of the governments of eleven Southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860-1861, carrying on all the affairs of a separate government and conducting a major war until defeated in the spring of 1865.
