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Missouri Compromise
It was an agreement passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri. The House of Representatives had refused to accept this compromise, and a conference committee was appointed. -
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The American Colonization Society forms
The American Colonization Society was established by Robert Finley as an attempt to satisfy two groups in America. These groups were on opposite ends of the spectrum involving slavery in the early 1800's. One group consisted of philanthropists, clergy and abolitionist who wanted to free African slaves and their descendants and provide them with the opportunity to return to Africa. The other group was the slave owners who feared free people of color and wanted to expel them from America. -
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The American Antislavery Society forms
This was one of the most prominent abolitionist organizations in the United States of America during the early nineteenth century. It was founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. The argument that had bean brought up over the Missouri Compromise, it quieted down considerably in the 1820s, only to be brought back to life by a series of events at the end of the decade. -
The Liberty Party forms
In U.S. history, an antislavery political organization. The party was an early advocate of the abolitionist cause. It was formed by those abolitionists, under the leadership of James G. Birney and Gerrit Smith, who repudiated William Lloyd Garrison's nonpolitical stand. It was an early advocate of the abolitionist cause. -
The Mexican-American War
It is also known as the First American Intervention, the Mexican War, or the U.S.–Mexican War, was an armed conflict between the United States of America and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory despite the 1836 Texas Revolution. the United States decisively defeated the Republic of Mexico and acquired over five hundred thousand square miles of new territory that today comprises much of the nation's Southwest. -
Wilmot Proviso
It was one of the major events leading to the American Civil War, would have banned slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War or in the future, including the area later known as the Mexican Cession, but which some proponents construed to also include the disputed lands in south Texas and New Mexico east of the Rio Grande -
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The free soil party forms
The Free Soil Party was a short-lived political party in the United States active in the 1848 and 1852 presidential elections, and in some state elections. It was a third party and a single-issue party that largely appealed to and drew its greatest strength from New York State. The party leadership consisted of former anti-slavery members of the Whig Party and the Democratic Party. Its main purpose was opposing the expansion of slavery into the western territories, arguing that free men on free. -
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Calfornia Gold Rush
It began on January 24th 1848 when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Islands, and Latin America, who were the first to start coming to the state in late 1848. The news of the gold brought over 300,000 people into the state of California from the rest of the United States. -
The Compromise of 1850
It was a package of five bills passed in September which defused a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North. The Compromise was greeted with relief, although each side disliked specific provisions. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin is published
Uncle Tom's Cabin is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies were sold in Great Britain. -
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
This created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing settlers in those territories to determine through Popular Sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. The act was designed by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. -
The Sumner-Brooks Affair
Ardent abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a two-day speech entitled The Crime Against Kansas. He described excesses that occurred there and the South’s complicity in them. -
The Dred Scott decision
The United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all blacks -- slaves as well as free -- were not and could never become citizens of the United States. Having failed to purchase his freedom, in 1846 Scott filed legal suit in St Louis Circuit Court through the help of a local lawyer. Historical details about why Scott sought recourse in the court system are unclear. -
The Lincoln-Douglas debates
It was a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois, and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures; thus Lincoln and Douglas were trying for their respective parties to win control of the Illinois legislature. -
The election of 1860
By the election of 1860 profound divisions existed among Americans over the future course of their country, and especially over the South's "peculiar institution," slavery. The Democrats met in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860 to select their candidate for President in the upcoming election.
