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Period: to
19 century
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Missouri compromise
Was writen by Thomas Jefferson and 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. -
Wilmot Proviso
was designed to eliminate slavery within the land acquired as a result of the Mexican War (1846-48). -
Compromise of 1850
has to do with five laws which was passed in September of 1850 that had to do with the issue of slavery. -
Kansas-Nebraska act
A guy by the name of Senator Stephen Douglas introduced a bill that divided the land west of Missouri into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. He argued for popular sovereignty, which would allow the settlers of the new territories to decide if slavery would be legal there. -
Dred Scott case
slave named Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in a St. Louis city court. The odds were in their favor. They had lived with their owner, an army surgeon, at Fort Snelling, then in the free Territory of Wisconsin. The Scotts' freedom could be established on the grounds that they had been held in bondage for extended periods in a free territory and were then returned to a slave state
