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Slavery in the South
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Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso was an amendment to a bill put before the House of Representatives during the Mexican War. The Wilmot Proviso was introduced by David Wilmot and stipulated that none of the territory aqcuried in the Mexican War should be open to slavery. The Wilmot Proviso created more conflict between the North and South over the issue of the expansion of slavery. However, the Wilmot Proviso was excluded from the bill. -
Free Soil Movement
The Free Soil Party was a political party that was formed of thousands of northerners who were oppposed to the expansion of slavery into Western territories. The group abandoned the Liberty Party's emphasis on the sinfulness of slavery and the rights of African Americans, instead they depicted slavery as a threat to republican liberties and white yeoman farming. The Wilmot Proviso's call for free soil was the first antislavery proposal to attract broad popular support. -
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in 1849 and fled to the Northern states. Instead of remaining in the North, Tubman made it her mission to rescue other enslaved Africans. Using the system of the Underground Railroad, Tubman was able to bring over 60 enslaved Africans to freedom. -
The Fugitive Slave Act
The Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850 between the North and South. This was one of the most controversial elements of the Compromise of 1850. The Act required that all escaped slaves were to be returned to their owners upon capture and that all citizens of free states had to cooperate with this. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin Published
Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is an anti-slavery novel. The novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as slavery. The novel had a great historical impact on slavery and is credited in helping to fuel the abolitionist cause that was occurring in the 1850's. -
Kansas Nebraska Act
The Kansas Nebraska Act 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 white male 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. -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas was a series of violent political confrontations in the United States involving people who were anti-slavery and pro-slavery. The event took place in the Kansas Territory and the neighboring towns of Missouri between 1854 and 1861. At the heart of the conflict was the question of whether Kansas would allow or outlaw slavery. Bleeding Kansas was a proxy war between anti-slavery forces in the North and pro-slavery forces from the South over the issue of slavery in the Union. -
Dred Scott Case
The case had been brought before the court by Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in a free state before returning to the slave state of Missouri. Scott argued that his time spent in the free states he had been in entitled him to emancipation. The court found that no black, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship, and therefore blacks were unable to petition the court for their freedom. The Dred Scott decision incensed abolitionists and heightened North-South tensions. -
Raid on Harpers Ferry
Abolitionist John Brown led a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown was attempting to start an armed slave revolt and destroy the institution of slavery. Brown’s raid helped make any further accommodation between North and South nearly impossible and thus became an important event leading up to the Civil War. -
The Confederacy
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. Its government, with Mississippian Jefferson Davis as president, sought a peaceful separation, but the United States refused to acquiesce in the secession which eventually resulted in the Civil War.
