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Uncle Toms Cabin
A novel written about anti-slavery by Harriet Beecher. it is said to have "helped lay the ground works for the civil war". -
Kansas Nebraska Act
passed by the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1854. It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´. -
Bloody Kansas
the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory and instead, using the principle of popular sovereignty, decreed that the residents would determine whether the area became a free state or a slave state. Pro slavery and free-state settlers moved into Kansas to try to influence the decision -
Republican Party
By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper mid-western states to discuss the formation of a new party. One meeting in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854 is remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party. -
Brooks-Sumner Incident
Senator Carles Sumner gave a speech called “The Crime Against Kansas” in which he criticized the Missouri senate. The speech went on for two days. Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina thought Sumner went too far. -
Election 1856
Democrat James Buchanan defeated Republican John C. Fremont with 174 electoral votes to Fremont's 114. -
LeCompton Constitution
a document framed in Lecompton, the Territorial Capital of Kansas, in 1857 by Southern pro-slavery advocates of Kansas. It contained clauses protecting slave holding and a bill of rights excluding free blacks, and it added to the frictions leading up to the U.S. Civil War. -
Dred Scott
Supreme Court ruled that Americans of African descent, whether free or slave, were not American citizens and could not sue in federal court. -
seven debates
delegates met in the Springfield, Illinois, statehouse for the Republican State Convention. They chose Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the U.S. Senate, running against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln delivered this address to his Republican colleagues in the Hall of Representatives. -
Lincoln Douglass Debates
series of seven debates between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois state election campaign -
John Brown
On the evening of October 16, 1859, Brown led 21 men on a raid of the federal armory of Harper's Ferry in Virginia (now West Virginia), holding dozens of men hostage with the plan of inspiring a slave insurrection. Brown's forces held out for two days they were eventually defeated by military forces led by Robert E. Lee. -
Secession
South Carolina legislature enacted an "ordinance" that "the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America,' is hereby dissolved."