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Slavery Timeline
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The Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was an effort by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to maintain a balance of power between the slaveholding states and free states. The slaveholding states feared that if they became outnumbered in Congressional representation that they would lack the power to protect their interests in property and trade. The south wanted to be a slave state while the south wanted to be a free man state. -
Formation of Free-Soil Party
The Free-Soil Party was formed in 1848 when antislavery members of both parties (northern democrates, and whigs) met in Buffalo, New York. There they founded the Free-Soil party. Its main purpose was opposing the expansion of slavery into the western territories, arguing that free men on free soil comprised a morally and economically superior system to slavery. -
Compromise of 1850
As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. Furthermore, California entered the Union as a free state and a territorial government was created in Utah. -
Formation Of Republican Party
By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is generally remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party. -
The Bloody Kansas
Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas or the Border War 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. -
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 (10 Stat. 277) 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. -
Dred-Scott Case
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, and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. -
John Brown's Raid
It was 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
The United States presidential election of 1860 was the 19th quadrennial presidential election. The election was held on Tuesday, November 6, 1860, and served as the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the American Civil War.