events leading to the

By roabrian

  • Missouri Compromise

    In February 1819, Representative James Tallmadge of New York introduced a bill that would admit Missouri into the Union as a state where slavery was prohibited. At the time, there were 11 free states and 10 slave states.

  • Wilmot Proviso

    David Wilmot as a rider on a $2,000,000 appropriations bill intended for the final negotiations to resolve the Mexican–American War (this was only three months into the two-year war).

  • Compromise of 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).

  • Kansas-Nebraska Act

    Antislavery supporters were outraged because, under the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery would have been outlawed in both territories. After months of debate, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed on May 30, 1854.

  • Bleeding Kansas

    The fraudulently elected pro slavery territorial legislature nevertheless convened in Pawnee on July 2, 1855.

  • Dred Scott Case

    The case was decided in favor of Sanford, but Dred Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case.

  • 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.