The Crucial Decade

By christinewhite1

  • the California Gold Rush begins

  • Harriet Tubman escapes and begins the "Underground Railroad"

  • California applies for statehood as a free state

  • Millard Fillmore

  • Compromise of 1850 passed

  • Stricter Fugitive Slave Act passed to target Undergraound Railroad

  • Franklin Pierce

  • Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is published

  • The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed

  • "Bleeding Kansas" begins

  • Gadsden Purchase of territory from Mexico is finalized

  • Congressman Preston Brooks(SC) beats Senator Charles Sumner with a cane

  • John Brown's "Pottawatamie Creek Massacre" occurs

  • James Buchanan

  • Dred Scott v. Sandford

  • Lincoln gives his "House Divided" speech

  • The first Lincoln-Douglas Debates

  • Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Freeport, Illinois. Douglas expresses "Freeport Doctrine," alienating pro-slavery Democrats

  • Lincoln is elected president

  • South Carolina Secedes from the Union

  • SC state troops fire on unarmed merchant ship "Star of the West," and prevent relief supplies to Fort Sumter