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Missouri compramise
After Missouri’s 1819 request for admission to the Union as a slave state, which threatened to upset the delicate balance between slave states and free states. To keep the peace, Congress made a two-part compromise, granting Missouri’s request but also admitting Maine as a free state. It also passed an amendment that drew an imaginary line across the former Louisiana Territory, establishing a boundary between free and slave regions. -
How did Texas become a state.
The citizens of the independent Republic of Texas elected Sam Houston president also endorsed the entrance of Texas into the Union. The likelihood of Texas joining the Union as a slave state delayed any formal action by the U.S. Congress. In 1844, Congress agreed to annex the territory of Texas. On December 29, 1845, Texas entered the United States as a slave state, broadening the irrepressible differences in the United States over the issue of slavery and setting off the Mexican-American War. -
Mexican-American War
The Mexican-American War (1846-1848), politically divided and militarily unprepared Mexico against the expansionist-minded administration of U.S. President James K. Polk, who believed the United States had a “manifest destiny” to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. A encounter in Rio Grande started off the fighting and was followed by a series of U.S. victories. When the war ended Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory; California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. -
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The war officially ended with the February 2, 1848, signing in Mexico of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty added an additional 525,000 square miles to United States territory, including the land that makes up all or parts of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Mexico also gave up all the claims to Texas. Also recognized Rio Grande as American's southern boundary. -
Fugitive slave act
The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway slaves. The first Fugitive Slave Act authorized local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who aided in their flight. Widespread resistance to the 1793 law later led to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which added further provisions regarding runaways and levied even harsher punishments for interfering in their capture. -
Compromise 1850
Divisions over slavery in territory gained in the Mexican-American War (1846-48). War were resolved in the Compromise of 1850. It consisted of laws admitting California as a free state, creating Utah and New Mexico territories with the question of slavery in each to be determined by popular sovereignty, settling a Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute in the former’s favor, ending the slave trade in Washington, D.C. , and making it easier for southerners to recover fugitive slaves. -
Why did violence break out in Kansas in the mid-1850s earning it the nickname “Bleeding Kansas”
Described the period of violence during the settling of the Kansas territory. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory. Instead, using the principle of popular sovereignty, residents would determine whether the area became a free state or a slave state. Pro slavery and free-state settlers flooded into Kansas to try to influence the decision. Violence soon erupted as both factions fought for control. -
Kansas - Nebraska Act and what did Stephen Douglas propose it
To gain the southerners' support, Douglas proposed creating two territories in the area Kansas and Nebraska and repealing the Missouri Compromise line. The Kansas Nebrask was an 1854 bill. The question of whether the territories would be slave or free would be left to the settlers under Douglas's principle of popular sovereignty. -
John Brown Raids
In the 1850's, Brown traveled to Kansas with five of his sons to fight against the pro slavery forces in the contest over that territory. On May 21, 1856, pro slavery men raided the abolitionist town of Lawrence, and Brown personally sought revenge. On May 25, Brown and his sons attacked three cabins along Pottawatomie Creek. They killed five men with broad swords and triggered a summer of Guerilla warfare in the troubled territory. One of Brown’s sons was killed. He traveled in small groups. -
Who was Dred Scott and what did he have to do with the U.S. Supreme Court and the spread of slavery?
In March 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott, a slave who had lived with his owner in a free state before returning to the slave state of Missouri. Scott argued that his time spent in these locations entitled him to emancipation. The court found that no black, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship, and therefore blacks were unable to petition. The Dred Scott decision incensed abolitionists and heightened North-South tensions.
