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Fugitive Slave Law
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 created a legal mechanism that enables a slaveholder to recover an escaped slave. The right to recover a slave is a right guaranteed by Article four of the U.S. Constitution to slaveholders. -
Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso was designed to eliminate slavery within the land acquired as a result of the Mexican War -
The 31st Congress of 1849
The Thirty-first United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, -
The Compromise of 1850
Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions in an attempt to seek a compromise and avert a crisis between North and South. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. -
Harriet Tubman
Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved family and friends using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.When a far-reaching United States Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, she helped guide fugitives further north into Canada, and helped newly freed slaves find work. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War. -
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas–Nebraska Act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through popular sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas was a series of violent political confrontations in the United States involving anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian" elements, that took place in the Kansas Territory and the neighboring towns of the state of Missouri between 1854 and 1861. -
Beating of Senator Charles Sumner
On May 22, 1856, in the United States Congress, Representative Preston Brooks attacked Senator Charles Sumner with his walking cane in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier. The beating nearly killed Sumner and it drew a sharply polarized response from the American public on the subject of the expansion of slavery in the United States. -
The Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott v. Sandford, was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be American citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court -
Harrpers Ferry
an attempt by the white abolitionist John Brown to start an armed slave revolt in 1859 by seizing a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. -
Election of 1860
Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. -
South Carolina Secedes from the Union
The Civil War began in South Carolina. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to declare its secession from the Union.
