* In the War with Mexico, the

US received a huge grant of

land.
* This new land presented
the Congress with a huge
problem.
* The Louisiana Purchase had
been mostly above the
Missouri Compromise line,
so the territories that
became states would be
mostly free states
* The territories of the
Mexican Cession would
mostly be slave states.
* This caused sectional
tensions to increase.
* The Wilmot Proviso, one of the major
events leading to the Civil War, would have banned
slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico in the
Mexican War known as the Mexican Cession.
* Congressman David Wilmot introduced the Proviso in
the House of Representatives on August 8, 1846.
* It passed the House but failed in the Senate, where
the South had greater representation
* It was reintroduced in February 1847 and again
passed the House and failed in the Senate.
* John C. Calhoun argued against the Proviso because
he said that the territories were owned by all the
states and that should be able to enter any state,
including slaves. Calhoun said that the Congress had
no right to ban slavery in any of the territories.
* What it did was to unleash all the passions of the
slavery and anti-slavery supporters.
* A doctrine under which the status of
slavery in the territories was to be
determined by the settlers themselves.
* Although the doctrine won wide support
as a means of avoiding sectional
conflict over the slavery issue, its
meaning remained ambiguous.
* First proposed in 1847 by Lewis Cass in
his 1848 presidential campaign
* the doctrine was incorporated in the
Compromise of 1850 and four years
later was an important feature of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act.
* Stephen A. Douglas was principal
promoter of the doctrine.
* Stephen Douglas called it "popular
sovereignty," but proslavery
Southerners, who wanted slavery
extended into the territories,
contemptuously called it "squatter
sovereignty."
*The conflict over the issue of slavery
in the territories led to the creation of
a new political party, the Free Soil
Party.
*Anti-slavery Democrats and northern
Whigs made up most of the party.
*They believed that slavery should not
be allowed in the territories. They did
not say it was morally wrong, but
instead said that it was an economic
issue.
*The Free Soilers opposed the use of
slaves on farms because it put free
white men out of a job.
* The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began
on January 24, 1848, when gold was discovered
by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill, California.
* News of the discovery brought some 300,000
people rushing to California from the rest of the
United States and abroad.
* The early gold-seekers, called "Forty-niners" (as
a reference to 1849) traveled to California by
sailing boat and in covered wagons across the
continent
* While most of the newly arrived were Americans,
the Gold Rush attracted tens of thousands from
Latin America, Europe, Australia, and China.
* The Compromise of 1850 was an intricate package of five
bills, passed on September 4, 1850, it was passed to avoid
the sectional conflict that arose from territorial expansion with
the Texas Annexation (December 29, 1845) and the following
Mexican-American War (1846–1848).
* It avoided secession or civil war at the time and quieted
sectional conflict for four years until the divisive
Kansas–Nebraska Act.
* The Provisions of the Compromise of 1850 were:
* Texas surrendered its claim to New Mexico
* The Wilmot Proviso was thrown out.
* the South was promised the possibility of slave states by
popular sovereignty in the new New Mexico Territory and Utah Territory.
* a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, which in practice outraged Northern
public opinion. The law called for ordinary citizens to turn in
runaway slaves or face imprisonment themselves. The Fugitive
slave act probably caused more damage than good for the south.
* the slave trade was banned in Washington D.C.

Senator Henry Clay designed the compromise, which failed to pass in

early 1850.
In the next session of Congress, Senator Stephen Douglas and Senator
Daniel Webster narrowly passed a slightly modified package
* The Underground
Railroad was an informal
network of secret routes
and safe houses used by
19th-century black slaves in
the United States to escape
to free states and Canada
with the aid of abolitionists
who were sympathetic to
their cause.
* Both Harriet Tubman and
Sojourner Truth were
important “conductors” on
the Underground Railroad.
* Stowe’s main goal with Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to
convince her large Northern readership of the
necessity of ending slavery.
* Most immediately, the novel served as a
response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave
Act of 1850, which made it illegal to give aid or
assistance to a runaway slave.
* Stowe created an exposé that revealed the
horrors of Southern slavery to people in the
North.
* Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in episodes in
the National Era in 1851 and 1852, then
published in its entirety on March 20, 1852.
* It sold 10,000 copies in its first week and
300,000 by the end of the year, astronomical
numbers for the mid-nineteenth century.
* Many historians have credited the novel with
being a major factor in the outbreak of the Civil
War.
* The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 created the territories of
Kansas and Nebraska.
* Repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820
* It allowed settlers in those territories to determine if they
would allow slavery within their boundaries.
* The initial purpose of the Kansas–Nebraska Act was to create
opportunities for a Mideastern Transcontinental Railroad. It
became problematic when popular sovereignty was written
into the proposal. The act was designed by Democratic Sen.
Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
* The act established that settlers could vote to decide whether
to allow slavery, in the name of popular sovereignty.
* Opponents of the act denounced it as a concession to the
slave power of the South.
* The new Republican Party, which was created in opposition to
the act, aimed to stop the expansion of slavery and soon
emerged as the dominant force throughout the North.
* Pro-slavery settlers came to Kansas mainly from neighboring
Missouri.
* Resident Missourians who crossed into Kansas solely for the
purpose of voting for slavery. They formed groups and were
dubbed border ruffians,
* Abolitionist settlers, known as "Jayhawkers" moved from the
East with express purpose of making Kansas a free state. A
clash between the opposing sides was inevitable.
* Successive territorial governors, usually sympathetic to slavery,
attempted unsuccessfully to maintain the peace. The territorial
capital of Lecompton, Kansas, the target of much agitation,
became such a hostile environment for Free-Staters that they
set up their own unofficial legislature at Topeka.
* John Brown and his sons gained notoriety in the fight against
slavery by brutally murdering five pro-slavery farmers in the
Pottawatomie Massacre with a broadsword. Brown also helped
defend a few dozen Free-State supporters from several hundred
angry pro-slavery supporters at the town of Osawatomie.
* Hostilities between the factions reached a state of low-intensity
civil war, which was damaging to Pres. Pierce. "Bleeding Kansas
“ caused the formation of the Republican Party. Routine ballot-
rigging and intimidation practiced by both pro- and anti-slavery
settlers failed to deter the immigration of anti-slavery settlers,
who won a demographic victory in the race to populate the
state.
* The Know Nothing movement was a nativist
American political movement of the 1840s and
1850s.
* It was created by popular fears that the
country was being overwhelmed by German
and Irish Catholic immigrants
* Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, it tried to
curb immigration and naturalization, though
unsuccessfully.
* Membership was limited to Protestant males
of British lineage over the age of twenty-one.
* There were few prominent leaders. They were
mainly middle-class and entirely Protestant.
Most ended up joining the Republican Party
* Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
commonly referred to as The
Dred Scott Decision, was a
decision by the
United States Supreme Court
that ruled that people of African
descent imported into the United
States and held as slaves
whether or not they were slaves
—were not protected by the
Constitution and could never be
citizens.
* It also held that the
United States Congress had no
authority to prohibit slavery in
federal territories. This
effectively rendered the Missouri
Compromise unconstitutional.
* Lastly, the Court ruled that
slaves—as chattel or private
property—could not be taken
away from their owners without
due process. The Supreme
Court's decision was written by
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.
* The Lecompton Constitution was a proposed constitutions
for the state of Kansas
* It was written in response to the anti-slavery position of the
1855 Topeka Constitution of James H. Lane and other free-
state advocates.
* The territorial legislature, consisting mostly of slave-owners,
met at the capital of Lecompton in September 1857.
* This new constitution enforced slavery in the Kansas and
protected the rights of slaveholders..
* President Buchanan endorsed the Lecompton Constitution
before Congress.
* On 4 January 1858, Kansas voters, having the opportunity to
reject the constitution altogether in the referendum,
overwhelmingly rejected the Lecompton proposal
* In Washington, the Lecompton constitution was defeated by
the House of Representatives.
* Though soundly defeated, debate over the proposed
constitution had ripped apart the Democratic party, paving
the way for Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.
* Lincoln expected to bring about the
eventual extinction of slavery by
stopping its further expansion into
any U.S. territory, and by offering
compensated emancipation
* Lincoln stood by the
Republican Party platform in 1860,
which stated that slavery should
not be allowed to expand into any
more territories.
* Most Americans agreed that if all
future states admitted to the Union
were to be free states, that slavery
would eventually be abolished.
* Lincoln believed that the slavery
that existed in the Southern states
was guaranteed constitutionally
and could not be outlawed. But he
did say that the slavery in the
South could not be exported to the
West.
* John Brown's raid on Harpers
Ferry was an attempt by white
abolitionist John Brown to start an
armed slave revolt by seizing a
United States Arsenal at Harpers F
erry
in Virginia in 1859.
* Brown's raid was defeated by a
detachment of U.S. Marines led by
Col. Robert E. Lee.
* John Brown had originally asked
Harriet Tubman to join him when
he attacked the armory, but on the
night of the raid she was ill, and
therefore did not show up.
* The raid was seen by most
Southerners as being an attempt to
kill them and saw Brown as a
danger.
* Northern abolitionists thought that
Brown was a martyr on the level of
Christ.
* The presidential election of 1860 set the stage
for the American Civil War.
* The nation had been divided throughout most of
the 1850s on questions of states' rights and
slavery in the territories.
* In 1860 this issue finally came to a head,
fracturing the formerly dominant Democratic Party
into Southern and Northern factions.
* This split the Democratic vote and brought
Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to
power without the support of a single Southern
state.
* Hardly more than a month following Lincoln's
victory came declarations of secession by South
Carolina and other states
*The Crittenden Compromise
(December 18, 1860) was an
unsuccessful proposal by Kentucky
Senator John J. Crittenden to resolve
the U.S. secession crisis of 1860–1861.
*There were many unpopular features
of the compromise that led to its
failure. It guaranteed the permanent
existence of slavery in the slave states
and addressed Southern demands in
regard to fugitive slaves and slavery in
the District of Columbia. But the heart
of the compromise was the permanent
reestablishment of the
Missouri Compromise line
*The Confederate States of America
was a government set up from 1861 to
1865 by eleven southern slave states of
the United States that had declared their
secession from the U.S.
*Asserting that states had a right to
secede, seven states declared their
independence from the United States
before the inauguration of
Abraham Lincoln as President on March 4,
1861
*four more states seceded after the
Civil War began at the
Battle of Fort Sumter (April 1861).
*The Union regarded secession as illegal
and refused to recognize the Confederacy.
* Jefferson Davis was elected the first
(and only) president of the Confederacy
* The Southern leaders met in
Montgomery, Alabama, to write their
constitution. Much of the
Confederate States Constitution
replicated the
United States Constitution verbatim, but
it contained several explicit protections
of the institution of slavery, though it
maintained the
existing ban on international slave-tradi
ng
.
* In certain areas, the Confederate
Constitution gave greater powers to the
states than the U.S. Constitution of the
time did, but in other areas, the states
actually lost rights they had under the
U.S. Constitution.
* the Confederate version prohibited the
central government from using
revenues collected in one state for
funding internal improvements in
another state.
*border states refers to the five slave
states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland,
Missouri, and West Virginia, which
bordered a free state and were aligned
with the Union.
*Though every slave state (except South
Carolina) contributed some white troops
to the Union as well as the Confederate
side,the split was most severe in these
border states, with men from the same
family often fighting on opposite sides.
*Had Maryland also joined the
Confederacy, Washington DC would have
been totally surrounded.