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The Compromise of 1850 eased slavery tensions by making California a free state, banning the slave trade in D.C., and letting Utah and New Mexico choose on slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act forced citizens to help capture escaped slaves and punished those who refused, angering the North and boosting abolitionism. -
The Kansas-Nebraska Act let people in those territories decide if they wanted slavery by popular vote. It repealed the Missouri Compromise which caused increasing tensions between the North and South and helping cause the Civil War. -
Bleeding Kansas" was a series of violent and bloody confrontations between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the Kansas Territory from 1854 to 1859. The conflict erupted after the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed residents to vote on whether to permit slavery. -
The Preston Brooks vs. Charles Sumner incident was a violent assault on May 22, 1856, when U.S. Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane. The attack was retribution for Sumner's anti-slavery speech, "The Crime Against Kansas," -
The Dred Scott v. Sandford case was about an enslaved man, Dred Scott, who sued for his freedom after being taken by his owner to free territories. The Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that African Americans were not citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. -
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a series of seven famous public debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas for one of Illinois' U.S. Senate seats, primarily focusing on the issue of slavery and its expansion. -
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was an attempt by abolitionist John Brown and his followers to seize the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia and incite a massive slave revolt in the South. The raid failed when Brown's forces were surrounded and subdued by U.S. Marines led by Robert E. Lee. -
Lincoln received a majority in the Electoral College, with all his Electoral College votes coming from Northern states. He prevailed in 18 states. Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 led to the Civil War because Southern states saw his Republican Party's anti-slavery stance as a direct threat to their way of life and economic system.