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Underground Railroad The underground railroad was a network of houses and places that abolitionists used to help slaves escape from the northern states or in Canada before the Civil War.
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Eli Whitney, a born inventor, patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton, by speeding up the process of removing the seeds from the cotton fibers.
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Congress passed a bill granting Missouri statehood as a slave state under the condition that slavery was to be forever prohibited in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase.
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It was an American abolitionist newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp.
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To avert a crisis between North and South, Senator Henry Clay, introduced a series of resolutions. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, DC., was abolished.
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A novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book is about life under slavery.
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Kansas-Nebraska Act
This act allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within there borders. -
On May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks attacked Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, with a walking cane.
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A ruling made by the supreme court, Dred Scott, a slave, sought to be declared a free man on the basis that he had lived for a time in a "free" territory with his master.
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This was a series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A.Douglas, and much of the debating concerned slavery and its extension into territories.
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Election of 1860
The United States presidential election in which Abraham Lincoln defeated Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. -
Fort Sumter
A commander named Major Robert Anderson, surrendered the fort after Confederate guns around the harbor opened fire.
