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Missouri Crisis
The Missouri Crisis and subsequent Compromise made clear how divisive an issue slavery could be in Congress. In the 1830s abolitionists sponsored nearly 700,000 petitions to abolish slavery and end the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Congress rejected them all and finally at the behest of southerners and with President Jackson's approval, Congress passed a "gag rule" in 1836 that prohibited any discussion of the antislavery petitions. -
Missouri Compromise
A settlement of a dispute between slave and free states, contained in several laws passed during 1820 and 1821. Northern legislators had tried to prohibit slavery in Missouri, which was then applying for statehood. -
William Garrison publishes The Liberator
William Garrison publishes The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. Garrison co-founded The Liberator that was published in 1831 to espouse his abolitionist views, and in 1832 he organized the New-England Anti-Slavery Society. -
Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion
Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion: Also known as the Southampton Insurrection, it was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, during August 1831.The state executed 56 slaves accused of being part of the rebellion. -
The Texas annexation
Was the 1845 incorporation of the Republic of Texas into the United States of America, which was admitted to the Union as the 28th state on December 29, 1845. Through secret negotiations with the Houston administration, Tyler secured a treaty of annexation in April 1844. -
The Wilmot Proviso
Proviso that was issued on August 8th, 1846 by the Pennsylvanian Democratic Congressman David Wilmot. It prohibited the expansion of slavery into any territory acquired by the United States from Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American War settlement. -
Underground Railroad
A network of houses and other places that abolitionists used to help slaves escape to freedom in the northern states or in Canada before the Civil War. -
Compromise of 1850
A set of laws, passed in the midst of fierce wrangling between groups favoring slavery and groups opposing it, that attempted to give something to both sides. Part of the Compromise included the Fugitive Slave Act, which proved highly unpopular in the North. -
Fugitive Slave law
A law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, which provided southern slaveholders with legal weapons to capture slaves who had escaped to the free states. -
Publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin
Novel, first published serially, by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852; it paints a grim picture of life under slavery. The title character is a pious, passive slave, who is eventually beaten to death by the overseer Simon Legree. -
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Bleeding Kansas
“Bloody Kansas” or the “Border War” was a series of violent political confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 involving anti-slavery "Free-Staters" and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian", or "southern" elements in Kansas. -
Formation of the Republican Party
In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act:
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed citizens in the Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide locally whether to allow slavery. The act was modeled on the Compromise of 1850 but repealed both that compromise and the Missouri Compromise of 1820. -
Dred Scott Supreme Court decision
A controversial ruling made by the Supreme Court in 1857, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Dred Scott, a slave, sought to be declared a free man on the basis that he had lived for a time in a “free” territory with his master. -
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Lincoln-Douglas debates
A series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, when both were campaigning for election to the United States Senate from Illinois. Much of the debating concerned slavery and its extension into territories such as Kansas. -
John Brown’s raid at Harper’s ferry
Abolitionist John Brown leaded 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. -
Election of 1860
The 1860 presidential election pitted four candidates against each other: Stephen Douglas for the Northern Democrats, John C. Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats, John Bell for the Constitutional Union Party, and Abraham Lincoln for the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln won the election.
