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Missouri Compromise
Congress orchestrated 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 that remained the law of the land until it was negated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. While it effectively settled the question of slavery from 1820-1854, its repeal began the sectarian conflict that eventually brought the nation. -
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Abolitionist Movement
From the 1830s until 1870, the abolitionist movement attempted to achieve immediate emancipation of all slaves and the ending of racial segregation and descrimination. While the goals of the abolitionist movement may have been noble, it was ironically this movement that its largely responsible for the bloody conflict of The American Civil War. -
Fugitive Slave Act
The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway slaves within the territory of the United States.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. -
Fugitive Slave Acts
The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway slaves within the territory of the United States. 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. This put Northerners directly in collision with slavery, and they couldn't live with that. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is published. The novel sold 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” Whether the story is true or not, the sentiment underscores the public connection between Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Civil War. -
Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was neither underground nor a railroad. It got its name because its activities had to be carried out in secret, using darkness or disguise, and because railway terms were used by those involved with system to describe how it worked. It was a factory between the disagreements between the north and the south. The south believed the north wasn't doing enough to stop slaves from escaping and was, instead, helping them live up with them. -
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John Brown and Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas is a term used to describe 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. Abolitionist John Brown led anti-slavery fighters in Kansas before his famed raid on Harper's Ferry -
Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott was a slave whose owner, had spent time in Illinois, a free state, and Winsconsin, a free territorty at the time of Scott's residence. The decision inflamed regional tensions, which burned for another four years befor exploding into the civil war. -
The Election of 1860
American presidential election held on Nov. 6, 1860, in which Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. The electoral split between Northern and Southern Democrats was emblematic of the severe sectional split, particularly over slavery, and in the months following Lincoln's election seven Southern states seceded, setting the stage for the American Civil War. -
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Southern Secession
Secession, as it applies to the outbreak of the American Civil War, comprises the series of events that began on Dec. 20, 1860 and extended through June 8, 1861 when eleven states in the lower and upper south severed their ties with the union. There were Union forts on confederate land and the confederates wanted Union soldiers to leave and were refused thus starting the war. -
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
In August of 1831, a slave named Nat Turner incited an uprising that spread through several plantations in southern Virginia. Turner and approximately seventy cohorts killed around sixty white people. The deployment of militia infantry and artillery suppressed the rebellion after two days of terror.
