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An existing federal law, enacted by Congress in 1793, allowed local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners, and imposed penalties upon anyone who aided their flight. -
Dred Scott, an enslaved man, was born in Virginia and later lived in Alabama and Missouri. In 1831, his original enslaver died, and he was purchased by a U.S. Army surgeon named John Emerson. -
Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer who had served a single term in Congress, emerged in the mid-1850s as an articulate and persuasive critic of slavery and achieved national prominence with a series of debates against Senator Stephen Douglas in an unsuccessful campaign for Douglas’s seat. -
In 1854, Senator Douglas, the author of the Compromise of 1850, introduced another piece of legislation “to organize the Territory of Nebraska,” an area that covered not just that present-day state but also Kansas, as well as Montana and the Dakotas -
Brown dreamed of carrying out an even bigger attack, one that would ignite a mass uprising of Southern enslaved people. On a night in October 1859, he and a band of 22 men launched a raid on Harpers Ferry, a town in what is now West Virginia, captured some prominent local citizens, and seized the federal arsenal there.