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Compromise of 1850
Five bills passed in September 1850, which defused a 4 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). -
Publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin
An anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long suffering black slave around whom the stories of ohter characters revolve. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlements, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing settlers in those territoriees to determine though Popular Sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. -
Brooks/Sumners Affair(Violence in Congrerss)
An American politician and senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner verbally attacked South Carolina senator Andrew Pickens Butler and other Southerns on the floor of the Senate for supporting the resulting bllodshed in Kansas. Senator Butler's young nephew Preston Brooks, a memeber of the House of Representatives, found a Speech so insulting to Butler that to avenge his honor he stalked onto the Senate on May 21 and beat Sumner unconscious with his cane. -
Dred Scott Decision
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 in 1857, popularly. -
John Brown's Raid
An abolitionist who used militant actions to abolish slavery in the United States at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. Brown's raid was defeated by a detachment of U.S Marines led by Col. Robert E. Lee. -
Election of 1860
A quadrennial election held, for the office of President of the United States and the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the American Civil War. -
Bleeding Kansas
A series of violent political confrontations invloving anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery "Boreder Ruffian" elements, that took place in the Kansas Territory and the neighboring towns of Missouri between 1854 and 1861.
