-
The Nullification Crisis
The Nullification Crisis was when South Carolina threatened to seceed from the United States after the passage of a tariff seen as a violation of State's rights. Vice President John C. Calhoun's South Carolina Exposition and Protest is presented to a state house committee formulating a response to the Tariff of 1828. -
The Abolition Movement
The Abolition Movement was a movement to end slavery by law. Frederick Douglass was a abolitionist speaker and writer who really tried to make people see his side. -
Frederick Douglass and the North Star
Frederick Douglass was a former slave, turned aboltionist author and speaker. The North Star was a nineteenth-century anti-slavery newspaper published in the United States by abolitionist Frederick Douglass. -
The Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 was five separate bills passed in the United States in September 1850. It allowed California into the Union as a free state and in return, gives southerners the fugitive slave law, which makes the process of aiding runaways more difficult. -
The Kansas/Nebraska Act and popular sovereignty
The Kansas/Nebraska Act was when Congressman Stephen Douglas asks to repeal the Missouri Compromise and institute popular sovereignty to all new territories. Popular sovereignty being the idea that people residing in a territory applying for statehood should allow the residents to vote for or against slavery. -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas was violence between pro and anti-slavery towns. The violence included murder and burning of buildings and vandalism on both sides. -
The Dred Scott decision
Scott (a slave taken from a slave state to a free state and then back to a slave state) sues, claiming he lived in a free state and by law, is now free. It was decided that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be American citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. -
South Carolina secession
Within days of Lincoln's election, South Carolina met to discuss secession (the act of breaking away from the United States). The south mentioned that the Constitution protected slavery and that the Northern states had breached their contract by refusing to assist in the return of fugitive slaves, so the Southern states were released from their obligation to the Union. -
Formation of the Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a republic composed of eleven Southern states that seceded from the Union in order to preserve slavery, states’ rights, and political liberty for whites. On July 15, 1870, Georgia became the last former Confederate state to be restored to the Union, more than five years after the Civil War's end. -
The Election of Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln came in dead last in the Border States and didn't even appear on the ballot in most parts of the South. However Lincoln got only about 40% of the popular vote, but because of the population of the North and West, he won the Electoral College easily. This didn't make the south happy.
