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In an effort to preserve the balance of power in Congress between slave and free states, the Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state
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a rebellion of enslaved Virginians that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, led by Nat Turner. -
a rule saying that people are not allowed to speak freely or express their opinions about a particular subject The law prohibits insurance companies from imposing gag rules that limit communication between doctors and their patients.
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Wilmot Proviso, in U.S. history, important congressional proposal in the 1840s to prohibit the extension of slavery into the territories, a basic plank upon which the Republican Party was subsequently built.
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Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad's "conductors." During a ten-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom.
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As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. Furthermore, California entered the Union as a free state and a territorial government was created in Utah.
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Washington, D.C. Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery story was published in forty installments over the next ten months. -
It became law on May 30, 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, created two new territories, and allowed for popular sovereignty. It also produced a violent uprising known as “Bleeding Kansas,” as proslavery and antislavery activists flooded into the territories to sway the vote. -
Bleeding Kansas describes the period of repeated outbreaks of violent guerrilla warfare between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces following the creation of the new territory of Kansas in 1854
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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 enslaved 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 debate
In the long term, the Lincoln-Douglas debates propelled Lincoln's political career into the national spotlight -
Brown's raid helped make any further accommodation between North and South nearly impossible and thus became an important impetus of the Civil War.
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The Election of 1860 demonstrated the divisions within the United States just before the Civil War. ... The Constitutional Union Party was also new; 1860 was the first and only time the party ran a candidate for president. The results of the 1860 election pushed the nation into war.