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The compromise of 1850 was a series of five laws enacted to defuse the escalating conflict over slavery between the North and South which included admitting California as a free state. -
“Bleeding Kansas” was a series of violent clashes between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the Kansas Territory from 1854 to 1861, following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. -
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, but its most significant and controversial provision was that it allowed residents to decide on the issue of slavery through popular sovereignty. -
Dred Scott v. Sandford was a landmark 1857 Supreme Court case that ruled African Americans were not U.S. citizens and had no right to sue in federal court, even if they had been free. -
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates were a series of seven formal public debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas for a. United States Senate seat representing Illinois. Douglas won the Senate seat because the state legislature which elected senators at the time chose him. However Lincolns powerful arguments eventually made him a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 -
John Browns raid on Harper’s Ferry was an October 1859 attempt by abolitionist John Brown to incite a slave revolt by seizing the U.S. arsenal;l at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan failed when his small group was quickly cornered by local militias and U.S. Marines, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was captured,tried for treason, and executed. -
The 1860 election was the first of six consecutive Republican presidential victories. Lincolns election as the first Republican president served as the main catalyst for Southern secession and the American Civil War.