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Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso was designed to eliminate slavery within the land acquired as a result of the Mexican War. Proposal brought forward by Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot that stipulated that none of the Mexican Cession territory would be allowed to permit slavery. Out of the arguments for this proviso came the Compromise of 1850. -
Compromise of 1850
Divisions over slavery in territory gained in the Mexican-American War were resolved in the Compromise of 1850. It consisted laws of adding California as a free state.The Compromise of 1850 consists of five laws passed in September of 1850 that dealt with the issue of slavery. -
Kansas Nebraska Act
The Kansas Nebarska act may have been the single most significant event leading to the Civil War.The Kansas-Nebrask Act was an 1854 bill that allows settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders. The act made it possible for the Kansas and Nebraska territories to open to slavery. -
Dred Scott V. Sandford
Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri. From 1833 to 1843, he resided in Illinois (a free state) and in an area of the Louisiana Territory, where slavery was forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. After returning to Missouri, Scott sued unsuccessfully in the Missouri courts for his freedom, claiming that his residence in free territory made him a free man. -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas is the term used to described the period of violence during the settling of the Kansas territory. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraksa Act overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory and instead, using the principle of popular sovereignty, decreed that the residents would determine whether the area became a free state or a slave state. -
Caning of Sumner
Charles Sumner was attacked by Representative Preston Brooks with his walking cane. The beating nearly killed Sumner and it drew a sharply polarized response from the American public on the subject of the expansion of slavery in the United States. -
Attack on Harpers Ferry
On the evening of October 16, 1859 John Brown, a staunch abolitionist, and a group of his supporters left their farmhouse hide-out en route to Harpers Ferry. Descending upon the town in the early hours of October 17th, Brown and his men captured prominent citizens and seized the federal armory and arsenal. Brown had hopes that the local slave population would join the raid and through the raid’s success weapons would be supplied to slaves and freedom fighters throughout the country -
Election of 1860
The United States presidential election of 1860 set the stage for the American Civil War. The nation had been divided throughout most of the 1850s on questions of states' rights and slavery in the territories. In 1860, this issue finally came to a head, fracturing the formerly dominant Democratic Party into Southern and Northern factions and bringing Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to power without the support of a single Southern state.
