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Missouri Compromise 1820
The Missouri Compromise was an effort by Congress to defuse the sectional and political rivalries triggered by the request of Missouri late in 1819 for admission as a state in which slavery would be permitted. At the time, the United States contained twenty-two states, evenly divided between slave and free. Admission of Missouri as a slave state would upset that balance; it would also set a precedent for congressional acquiescence in the expansion of slavery. -
Wilmot Proviso
Congressman David Wilmort first introduced the proviso in the United States House of Representatives on August 8, 1846, as a rider on a $2,000,000 appropriations bill intended for the final negotiations to resolve the Mexican–American War. It passed the House but failed in the Senate, where the South had greater representation. It was reintroduced in February 1847, again passed the House and failed in the Senate. In 1848, an attempt to make it part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also failed. -
Zachary Taylor
Zachary Taylor served in the army for some four decades, commanding troops in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War and the second of the Seminole Wars. He became a full-fledged war hero through his service in the Mexican War, which broke out in 1846 after the U.S. annexation of Texas. Elected president in 1848, Taylor entered the White House at a time when the issue of slavery and its extension into the new western territories had caused a major rift between the North and South. -
Compromise of 1850
Divisions over slavery in territory gained in the Mexican-American (1846-48). War were resolved in the Compromise of 1850. It consisted of laws admitting California as a free state, creating Utah and New Mexico territories with the question of slavery in each to be determined by popular sovereignty, settling a Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute in the former’s favor, ending the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and making it easier for southerners to recover fugitive slaves. -
Millard Filmore
Millard Fillmore served four terms in Congress but declined to run for reelection after 1843. At Weed’s urging, he ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York in 1844. Four years later, Fillmore was serving as comptroller of New York when he was chosen as a dark horse pick for vice president under the Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor. As a pro-business northerner, Fillmore served to balance the victorious Whig ticket opposite Taylor, a slaveholder from Louisiana. -
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. Abolitionists nicknamed it the "Bloodhound Law" for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves. -
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is 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.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. -
Franklin Pierce
Born on November 23, 1804, in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce was the son of Benjamin Pierce, a hero of the American Revolution who was twice elected governor of New Hampshire. The younger Pierce graduated from Bowdoin College in 1824 and began studying law; he was admitted to the bar in 1827. At the age of 24, he won election to the New Hampshire state legislature, and two years later he became its speaker. -
Summer Caning
On May 22, 1856, the "world's greatest deliberative body" became a combat zone. In one of the most dramatic and deeply ominous moments in the Senate's entire history, a member of the House of Representatives entered the Senate chamber and savagely beat a senator into unconsciousness. -
James Buchanan
James Buchanan, America’s 15th president, was in office from 1857 to 1861. During his tenure, seven Southern states seceded from the Union and the nation teetered on the brink of civil war.APennsylvania native, Buchanan began his political career in his home state’s legislature and went on to serve in both houses of the U.S. -
The Dred Scott Case
Dred Scott, a black slave, and his wife had once belonged to army surgeon John Emerson, who had bought him from the Peter Blow family of St. Louis. After Emerson died, the Blows apparently helped Scott sue Emerson’s widow for his freedom, but lost the case in state court. Because Mrs. Emerson left him with her brother John Sanford a New York citizen, Scott sued again in federal court, claiming Missouri citizenship. Scott’s lawyers eventually appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. -
Kansas Nebraska act/Bleeding Kansas
It was created for the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and was drafted by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and President Franklin Pierce. The initial purpose of the Kansas–Nebraska Act was to open up thousands of new farms and make feasible a Midwestern Transcontinental Railroad. The popular sovereignty clause of the law led pro and anti-slavery elements to flood into Kansas with the goal of voting slavery up or down, resulting in Bleeding Kansas. -
Lincoln-Douglas Debate
The Lincoln–Douglas Debates (also known as The Great Debates of 1858) were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and 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. -
Creation of the Republican party
By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper Midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is generally remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party. -
Harpers Ferry
Born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Ohio, John Brown came from a staunchly Calvinist and anti-slavery family. He spent much of his life failing at a variety of businesses–he declared bankruptcy in his early 40s and had more than 20 lawsuits filed against him. In 1837, his life changed irrevocably when he attended an abolition meeting in Cleveland, during which he was so moved that he publicly announced his dedication to destroying the institution of slavery. -
Lincoln's Election of 1860
Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois. -
Southern Secession
The border slave states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri remained with the Union, although they all contributed volunteers to the Confederacy. Fiftycounties of western Virginia were loyal to the Union government, and in 1863this area was constituted the separate state of West Virginia. Secession in practical terms meant that about athird of the population with substantial material resources had withdrawn from what had constituted asingle nation and established a separate government.
