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Slavery Time Line
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The Missouri compromise
Prohibbited slavery in the former Lousiana Territory north of the Paralell except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri. -
Free Soil Party
The Free Soil party's main purpose was opposing the expansion of slavery in the western territories, arguing that free men on free soil compromissed a morally and economically superoir system to slavery. -
Compromise of 1850
A package of five spperate bills passed by the United States Congress which defused a four year political confrontation between slave and free states regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). -
Uncle Tom's Cabin
An anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 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 whether or not if they would allow slavery within each territory. -
Bleeding Kansas
A series of violent political confrontations in the United States involving anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery elements, that took place in the Kansas Territory and the neighboring towns of the state of Missouri between 1854 and 1861. -
Formation of The Republican Party
The second oldest existing political party in the United States after its great rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas–Nebraska Act, and to promote more vigorous modernization of the economy. The Party had almost no presence in the South, but by 1858 in the North it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state. -
Dred Scott Case
A landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be American citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court, and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. Dred Scott, an enslaved African American man who had been taken by his owners to free states and territories, attempted to sue for his freedom. I -
John Brown's raid
An attempt by the white abolitionist John Brown to start an armed slave revolt by seizing a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown's raid, accompanied by 21 men in his party, was defeated by a detachment of U.S. Marines led by Col. Robert E. Lee. John Brown had originally asked Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, both of whom he had met in his formative years as an abolitionist in Springfield, Massachusetts, to join him in his raid, but Tubman was prevented by ill. -
Election of 1860
The 19th presidential election. The election was held in 1860 and served as the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the American Civil War. The United States had been divided during the 1850s on questions surrounding the expansion of slavery and the rights of slave owners. In 1860, these issues broke the Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions, and a new Constitutional Union Party appeared. In the face of a divided opposition, the Republican Party