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Wilmot Proviso
This bill aimed to outlaw slavery in territories taken from Mexico. The bill passed in the House of Representatives but was defeated in the Senate thus cause a division in Congress. Although, not a success it led to the formation of the Free Soil Party. -
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The Nation Breaking Apart
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Compromise of 1850
Series of congressional laws intended to settle the major disagreement between free states and slave states. Some poeple celebrated, believing that it saved the union. But the compromise would not bring peace. -
Kansas-Nabraska Act
Split the land that was once one into Kansas and Nebraska to allow Douglas' plan of a continental railroad that went through the north. His provision allowed popular sovereighty to decide the issue of slavery. This repealed the Missouri compromise. -
Bleeding Kansas
When the United States was debating whether or not to abolish slavery, Kansas was about to become a state. The government decided to leave the decision of whether or not slavery would be a legal or not up to the resident of Kansas themselves. People disagreed on it. So much that a sort of mini civil war broke out all across Kansas. -
Caning of Sumner
One of the most violent episodes in congressional history took place in this chamber on May 22, 1856. The Senate was not in session when South Carolina Representative Preston S. Brooks entered the chamber to avenge the insults that Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner had levelled at Brooks' cousin, Senator Andrew P. Butler. Sumner's "Crime Against Kansas" speech of May 19-20 was sharply critical, on a personal level, of Butler and several other senators who had supported the "popular sovereignt -
Dred Scott V. Sandford
Also know as the Dred Scott decision, was a ruling by the United States supreme court that people of Africa Desert brought into the United States and held as slaves were not protected by the constition and were not United States citizens. The court against Scott. -
Attack on Harpers Ferry
A federal arsenal in Verginia that was captured in 1859 during slave revolt. The United States Marines attacked Brown at Harpers Ferry. Some of his men escaped. But Brown and six others were captured, and ten men were killed. -
Election of 1860
The Election of 1860 turned into two different races for the presidency, one in the North and one in the south. Lincoln and Douglas were the only candidates with much support in the North. Breckinride and Bell competed for Southern votes. -
Secession
By 1860 the conflict between northern and southern interests had grown so strong that when Abraham Lincoln was elected president South Carolina became the first state to break off from the union and form its own country. Ten more states would follow the secession: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Lousiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.
