Crisis of Union

The election won by Zachary Taylor of the Whig Party, who ran against former President Martin Van Buren of the Free Soil Party and Lewis Cass of the Democratic Party.

This date is technically when Harriet Tubman escaped her master. The underground railroad was a thing for a while, not just one year. The Underground Railroad was a system of abolitionists who smuggled slaves out of the South. A very prominent conductor of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, successfully rescued many slaves and avoided capture by southern planters.

Compilation of proposals from Henry Clay. California would become a free state and territories won from Mexico would be determined by popular sovereignty.

The event where local residents of Christiana, Pennsylvania defended a fugitive slave and killed the slave owner. Southerners demanded the hanging of those responsible, who were accused of treason and making war on the United States, but after the first defendant was acquitted, the government dropped the case. The trial was the first nationally-covered challenge to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

A novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 that featured Uncle Tom, a kind and accepting slave. It sold very widely and gained support for abolition, but was despised in the South.

A series of violent outbreaks between abolitionists and pro slavery supporters in the Kansas region that showed popular sovereignty was not the answer to the slavery problem.

Nebraska would become two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. Kansas would be a slave state and Nebraska would be a free state.

A new party that made antislavery the center of the Republican philosophy. It became very big in the North as it included many businessmen who believed that slavery stifled industry and that slavery encouraged Immoral or wicked behavior.

The first Republican election, they nominated John C. Fremont. The Democrats nominated James Buchanan and the Know-Nothings nominated former President Millard Fillmore. Buchanan won under the promise that he would “stop the agitation of the slavery issue.”

Dred Scott, a slave, had been taken by his master and kept in Illinois, where slavery was outlawed. He tried to sue to gain freedom, but the Supreme Court ruled against him in 1857.