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Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five bills, passed in September 1850, which defused a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). -
Fugitive Slave Act
The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers. This was one of the most controversial acts of the 1850 compromise and heightened Northern fears of a "slave power conspiracy". It declared that all runaway slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters. -
Stowe’s “Uncle Toms Cabin”
An anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing settlers in those territories to determine through Popular Sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. -
" Beechers Bible "
"Beecher's Bibles" was the name given to the breech loading Sharps rifles that were supplied to the anti-slavery immigrants in Kansas. -
Brooks-Summer Incident
The unfortunate event between Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Preston Brooks from South Carolina further divided the North and the South, and thus lead to one of America’s most appalling events, the Civil War. -
Pottawatomie Massacre
occurred during the night of May 24 and the morning of May 25, 1856. In reaction to the sacking of Lawrence (Kansas) by pro-slavery forces, John Brown and a band of abolitionist settlers (some of them members of the Pottawatomie Rifles) killed five settlers north of Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin County, Kansas. -
Dred Scott
Dred Scott was an African-American slave in the United States who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as "the Dred Scott Decision." -
Lecompton Constitution
Kansas voters, having the opportunity to reject the constitution altogether in the referendum, overwhelmingly rejected the Lecompton proposal by a vote of 10,226 to 138.And in Washington, the Lecompton constitution was defeated by the federal House of Representatives in 1858. Though soundly defeated, debate over the proposed constitution had ripped apart the Democratic party. Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1861. -
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois, and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures; thus Lincoln and Douglas were trying for their respective parties to win control of the Illinois legislature. The debates previewed the issues that Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 presidential election. -
John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry
By white abolitionist John Brown to start an armed slave revolt by seizing a United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Virginia in 1859. Brown's raid was defeated by a detachment of U.S. Marines led by Col. Robert E. Lee. John Brown had originally asked Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, both of whom he had met in his formative years as an abolitionist in Springfield, Massachusetts, to join him when he attacked the armory, but illness prevented Tubman from joining him. -
Raid on Lawrence, Kansas
was a Confederate guerrilla leader during the American Civil War. After leading a Confederate bushwhacker unit along the Missouri-Kansas border in the early 1860s, which included the infamous raid and sacking of Lawrence, Kansas in 1863, Quantrill eventually ended up in Kentucky where he was mortally wounded in a Union ambush in May 1865, aged 27. -
Abraham Lincoln wins election
On November 6th, 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected the 16th President of the United States. It had been a four way race, with the four political parties holding different views regarding slavery, especially about the expansion of slavery to new territories as the nation expanded. Lincoln was the Republican -
South Carolina Secedes
the first state to vote to secede from the Union which it did on December 20, 1860. It was readmitted to the United States on June 25, 1868 -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas, was a series of violent political confrontations involving anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian" elements, that took place in the Kansas Territory. -
Freeport Doctrine
articulated by Stephen A. Douglas at the second of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in Freeport, Illinois. Lincoln tried to force Douglas to choose between the principle of popular sovereignty proposed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the majority decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which stated that slavery could not legally be excluded from U.S. territories
