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Period: to
19th Century
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Missouri Compromise
Henry Clay came up with this idea in March 3, 1820. This Compromise was about people who were pro-slavery and anti-slavery. -
Wilmot Proviso
David Wilmot came up with this. The Wilmot Proviso was designed to eliminate slavery within the land acquired as a result of the Mexican War. -
Compromise of 1850
Divisions over slavery in territory gained in the Mexican-American 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. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas-Nebrask Act was an 1854 bill that mandated “popular sovereignty”–allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders. -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas is the term used to described the period of violence during the settling of the Kansas territory. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraksa Act overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory. -
Dred Scott Case
In March 1857, in one of the most controversial events preceding the American Civil War (1861-65), the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Scott argued that his time spent in these locations entitled him to emancipation. In his decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a staunch supporter of slavery, disagreed: The court found that no black, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship, and therefore blacks were unable to petition the court for their freedom -
John Brown's Raid
Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to start an armed slave revolt and destroy the institution of slavery.
