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Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a network of routes and places that helped guide one hundred thousand enslaved people in the American South to escape to the North to get freedom. “Conductors” like Harriet Tubman and William Still guided runaway enslaved people from place to place along the routes. The name “Underground Railroad” was also used metaphorically, not literally. -
Missouri Compromise
In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil. -
“The Liberator”
The Liberator was the most widely circulated anti-slavery newspaper before the Civil war and throughout the Civil War. It was published and edited in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison, a leading white abolitionist and founder of the influential Anti-Slavery Society. Overall it was a major platform to attack slavery and its supporters, inspire action, and promote equal rights for all. -
Nat Turner Rebellion
Nathanial “Nat” Turner was an enslaved man who led a rebellion of enslaved people on August 21, 1831. His action set off a massacre of up to 200 Black people and a new wave of oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of enslaved people. -
Frederick Douglass
The movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by people such as Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator and writer. When he escaped from slavery to New York City in 1838, he later settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. At an 1841 antislavery convention, he was asked to recount his experience as an enslaved person. He so moved his audience that he became an agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. -
The Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 decided California to become apart of the Union as a free state, allows the slave states of New Mexico and Utah to be decided by popular sovereignty, and bans slave trade in D.C A second fugitive slave law, enforced by the federal government, strengthens the rights of slave owners and threatens the rights of free blacks. -
Uncle Toms Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe shared ideas about the injustices of slavery, pushing back against dominant cultural beliefs about the physical and emotional capacities of black people. Stowe became a leading voice in the anti-slavery movement. -
Kansas-Nebraska act
The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out which caused bloodshed in the new state of Kansas. -
Dred Scott decision
The United States Supreme Court decides, seven to two, that African Americans can never be citizens and that Congress has no authority to outlaw slavery in any territory. -
John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry
Two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred over the issue of slavery. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal. It all resulted in anger, deaths and hanging. -
President Abraham Lincoln
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made it clear that a Union victory in the Civil War would mean the end of slavery in the United States.