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Missouri Compromise
In order to keep the balance between free/slave states they let Missouri and Maine in as states and stated that there were to be no other slave states over the 36 30 parallel. -
Wilmot Proviso
This prohibited the expansion of slavery into any territory acquired by the United States from Mexico as a result of a settlement in the Mexican-American War. -
Mexican American War
The battle for land where Mexico was fighting to keep what they thought was their property and the U.S. desired to retain the disputed land of Texas and obtain more of Mexico's northern lands. -
Compromise of 1850
The south gained by the strengthening of the fugitive slave law, the north gained a new free state, California. Texas lost territory but was compensated with 10 million dollars to pay for its debt. -
Fugitive Slave Law
Following increased pressure from Southern politicians, Congress passed a revised Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Part of Henry Clay's famed Compromise of 1850—a group of bills that helped quiet early calls for Southern secession -
Uncle Toms Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe's inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made aiding or assisting runaway slaves a crime in free states. Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was first published in 1852, is thus a deliberate and carefully written anti-slavery argument. -
Kansas Nebraska Act
It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise -
LeCompton Constitution
It contained clauses protecting slave-holding and a bill of rights excluding free blacks, and it added to the frictions leading up to the U.S. Civil War. -
Dred Scott v. Sandford
This affirmed the right of slave owners to take their slaves into the Western territories. -
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
The only real impact of the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858 was that they put Lincoln on the national "map" as a major political figure. The debates were staged as part of a race between the two men for a seat in the US Senate. Douglas won the election. -
John Browns Raid on Harpers Ferry
John Brown's attempt to initiate an armed slave revolt in 1859 by taking over a United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. -
Election of 1860
The Republican Party, which fielded its first candidate in 1856, was opposed to the expansion of slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the party's nominee in 1860, was seen as a moderate on slavery, but Southerners feared that his election would lead to its demise, and vowed to leave the Union if he was elected. -
Crittenden Compromise
Crittenden Compromise. a series of constitutional amendments proposed in Congress in 1860 to serve as a compromise between pro-slavery and antislavery factions -
South Carolina secedes from the Union
The convention then adjourned to Charleston to draft an ordinance of secession. When the ordinance was adopted on December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first slave state in the south to declare that it had seceded from the United States. -
“Bleeding Kansas”
Bloody Kansas or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas. -
Attack on Ft. Sumter
Major Robert Anderson, garrison commander, surrendered the fort and was evacuated the next day. The Union would not recapture Fort Sumter for nearly four years.
