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Missouri Compromise 1820
n an effort to preserve the balance of power in Congress between slave and free states, the Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. -
Nullification Crisis of 1828
The Nullification Crisis was a sectional crisis during the presidency of Andrew Jackson created by South Carolina's 1832 Ordinance of Nullification. -
Mexican War/ Mexican Cession
The Mexican Cession of 1848 is a historical name in the United States for the region of the modern day southwestern United States that Mexico ceded to the U.S. in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, but had not been part of the areas east of the Rio Grande which had been claimed by the Republic, though the Texas annexation resolution two years earlier had not specified Texas's southern and western boundary. -
Compromise of 1850
Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions on January 29, 1850, 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. -
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. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 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
Proslavery and antislavery settlers rushed into the Kansas Territory. 5000 proslavery Missourians came and voted illegally giving legislative power in Kansas to the proslavery group.
Antislavery settlers boycotted and created their own government.
A proslavery mob attacked and destroyed Lawrence Kansas, killing antislavery members. -
Brooks-Sumner Affair
Preston Brooks attacked Sumner on the floor of Congress. He hit him over 30 times with a cane. -
Dred Scott Case
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 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, and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. -
Lincoln-Douglas Debate
The Lincoln–Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Illinois, and Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. -
Harpers Ferry Attack
On the evening of October 16, 1859 John Brown, a staunch abolitionist, and a group of his supporters left their farmhouse hide-out en route to Harpers Ferry. Descending upon the town in the early hours of October 17th, Brown and his men captured prominent citizens and seized the federal armory and arsenal. Brown had hopes that the local slave population would join the raid and through the raid’s success weapons would be supplied to slaves and freedom fighters throughout the country; this was no -
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. The United States had been divided during the 1850s on questions surrounding the expansion of slavery and the rights of slave owners. In 1860, these issues broke the Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions, and a new Constitutional Union Party appeared. -
South Carolina Secedes
South Carolina seceded on Dec 20, 1860. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas also left. -
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Beginning of the Civil War
The American Civil War, widely known in the United States as simply the Civil War as well as other sectional names, was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 to determine the survival of the Union or independence for the Confederacy.
