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The Abolition Movement
The goal of the abolitionist movement was the immediate emancipation of all slaves and the end of racial discrimination and segregation. Advocating for immediate emancipation distinguished abolitionists from more moderate anti-slavery advocates. -
The Nullification Crisis
Nullification is the formal suspension by a state of a federal law within its borders. The concept was first given voice by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts. The principle was accepted by the Hartford Convention of New Englanders in 1814 as well as many in the South, who saw it as protection against federal encroachment on their rights. -
Frederick Douglass and the North Star
He helped slaves escape to the North while working with the Underground Railroad. He established the abolitionist paper The North Star on December 3, 1847. Most influential black antislavery paper published during the antebellum era. -
The Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 consists of five laws passed in September of 1850 that dealt with the issue of slavery. -
The Kansas/Nebraska Act and popular sovereignty
Though Douglas believed the settlers of a territory should decide the slavery question without input from the rest of the nation, his Illinois rival Abraham Lincoln begged to differ. He thought it only logical that the federal territories be regulated by the federal government, meaning Congress. Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 affected the political balance between free and slave states -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas refers to the time between 1854-58 when the Kansas territory was the site of much violence over whether the territory would be free or slave. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 set the scene by allowing the territory of Kansas to decide for itself whether it would be free or slave -
The Dred Scott decision
In March of 1857, Scott lost the decision as seven out of nine Justices on the Supreme Court declared no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen, or ever had been a U.S. citizen. As a non-citizen, the court stated, Scott had no rights and could not sue in a Federal Court and must remain a slave. -
The election of Abraham Lincoln
The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 is commonly viewed as the beginning of a chain of events that erupted into civil war in April 1861. Lincoln was the first member of the Republican Party elected to the presidency, a remarkable rise for a political party that had been in existence less than ten years. -
South Carolina secession
Meeting in Charleston on December 20, that convention passed unanimously the first ordinance of secession, which stated, "We, the people of the State of South Carolina in convention assembled, do declare and ordain... that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'the United States of America,' is hereby dissolved," -
Formation of the Confederate States of America
During the American Civil War, the Confederate States of America consisted of the governments of 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860-61, carrying on all the affairs of a separate government and conducting a major war until defeated in the spring of 1865.
