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Wilmot Proviso
In 1848, David Wilmot, an anti slavery democratic congressman from Pennsylvania took up the refrain and proposed the so called Wilmot proviso, a ban on slavery in any territories gained from the war. The Wilmot Proviso upset the Compromise of 1820 and the Proviso’s defeat only intensified sectional feelings. -
Free Soil Movement
The Northerners organized the Free Soil Party in 1848 which abandoned the Garrisonians and liberty party's emphasis on the sinfulness of slavery and the natural rights of African Americans. They also advocated for free homestead and internal improvements. -
Compromise of 1850
To mollify the South, the compromise included a new Fugitive Slave Act giving federal support to slave catchers. -
Uncle Tom’s Cabin published
A the most influential book of its day, published by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book was about the conflict between an enslaved man named Tom and the brutal white slave owner Simon Legree. This moved many people to regard slave owners as monstrously cruel and inhuman. Southern believed the North were just agains their way of life. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas-Nebraska act divided the Nebraska Territory into two parts, the Kansas territory and the Nebraska Territory. The Act allowed settlers in each territory to decide whether to allow slavery or not. Which gave Southern slavery owners the right to expand slavery, that had been previously closed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. -
Republican Party formed
The new party was a coalition of ex-whigs, free soilers , and abolitionists and all the members opposed slavery which they argues drove down the wages of free workers and degraded the dignity of manual labor. Their overriding purpose was to oppose the spread of slavery in the territories-nor to end slavery itself. -
“Bleeding Kansas” incidents
Slaveholders from the neighboring state of Missouri also set up homestead in Kansas. This caused Northern abolitionist and Free-Soilers to respond by organizing the New England Aid. Then fighting soon broke out between the proslavery and antislavey groups, and the territory became known as “bleeding Kansas”. Later a proslavery force, seven hundred strong looted and burned the fee soil town of Lawrence. The attack enraged John Brown, a fifty-six year old abolitionist from New York and Ohio. -
Caning of Charles Summer
Senator Charles Summer verbally attacked the Democratic administration in avtrolic speech, “The Crime Against Kansas”. Including persona remarks against South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler. Butler’s nephew, defending his absent uncles’s honor by walking into the Senate chamber and beating Summer over the head with a cane. This outraged the North, and the House voted to censure Butler. But pleased the Southers, who applauded Butler. -
Dred Scott v. Sanford decision
Scott had been held in slavery in Missouri and then taken to the free territory of Wisconsin where he lived for two years before returning to Missouri. Arguing that his residence on free soil made him a free citizen, Scott sued for his freedom in Missouri 1846. But majority of the Court decided agains Scott because he had no right to sue a federal court, congress did not have the power tomdeprive any person of property without due process of law, and the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. -
Lincoln-Douglas debates
Lincoln pointed out that the proslavery Supreme Court might soon declare that the constitution "does not permit a state to exclude slavery". During a series of seven debates, Douglass declared his support for the white supremacy. -
John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry
In October 1859, Brown lead eighteen heavily armed black and white men in a raid in the federal arsenal at a Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown hoped to arm slaves with the arsenals weapons and mount a major rebellion to end slavery. Southern whites saw the raid as final proof of the North’s true intentions-to use slave revolts to destroy the South. -
Election of Lincoln
The national republican convention chose Lincoln as its presidential candidate because he was more moderate on slavery than the best known republicans, Senators William Seward of New York and Salmon Chase of Ohio.
