Conflict Over Slavery in the 1850s: The Crisis Grows

Chapter 10 Section 2

• Analyze why the Fugitive Slave Act increased tensions between the North and South.

• Assess how the Kansas-Nebraska Act was seen differently by the North and South.

• Explain why fighting broke out in Kansas and the effects of that conflict.

Objectives

Opposition to Slavery Intensifies

• By the mid-1800s, slavery was a national issue. Every American from the North, the South, and the West had an opinion.

•The Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850, required all citizens to catch and return runaway slaves.

• Nullified the Fugitive Act• Enabled state officials to

arrest slave catchers for kidnapping free African Americans

• Increased northern white support of abolitionism

Some Northern states passed personal liberty laws. These laws

• White abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which gave readers compassion for the nonviolent enslaved Tom.

• Black abolitionist Martin Delany wrote Blake in which enslaved Blake chooses to rebel violently against slavery.

Popular novels condemned slavery, gaining northern support for abolition and infuriating the South.

•Tensions greatly increased between the North and the South as:

• African Americans increased their resistance• The abolitionist movement grew stronger in the

North and West• The question of whether a new territory should

become a slave or free state arose again in the Nebraska territory

Kansas-Nebraska Act• The legislation divided the

Nebraska territory into Kansas and Nebraska. Residents of each territory would vote to allow or outlaw slavery.

• In effect, it nullified the Missouri Compromise by allowing slavery to spread in areas where it had been banned.

• Northerners and Southerners went to Kansas to influence the vote.

• Proslavery residents from Missouri, know as Border Ruffians, attacked the antislavery town of Lawrence.

• Northern abolitionist John Brown responded by killing five proslavery settlers.

• Both sides armed for battle.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act set off violence between proslavery and antislavery forces in Kansas.

•The South wanted Kansas to be a slave state. •The North wanted Kansas to be a free state.

In 1861, after the Civil War started, Kansas joined the Union as a free state.

Violence in the Senate

• Violence over the slavery issue broke out on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Southern Representative Preston Brooks badly beat Northern Senator Charles Sumner with a cane.