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In the weeks following the election, talk of secession filled the air. Alarmed senators formed a committee to search for yet another compromise that might hold the nation together. They knew that finding one would not be easy, but they still had to do something to stop the rush toward disunion and disaster.

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ith his opposition divided three ways, Lincoln sailed to victory, but it was an odd victory. Lincoln won the presidential election with just 40 percent of the votes, all of them cast in the North. In ten Southern states, he was not even on the ballot.

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While Lincoln fought to stop the spread of slavery through politics, abolitionist John Brown adopted a more extreme approach. Rather than wait for Congress to act, Brown planned to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. An arsenal is a place where weapons and ammunition are stored.Brown wanted to use the weapons to arm slaves for a rebellion that would end slavery.

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Lincoln's opponent in the Senate race was Senator Stephen Douglas, an Illinois senator who saw no reason why the nation could not go on half-slave and half-free.When Lincoln challenged him to debate the slavery issue, Douglas agreed.

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In 1857, the slavery controversy shifted from Congress to the Supreme Court, which was about to decide a case concerning a Missouri slave named Dred Scott. Years earlier, Scott had traveled with his owner to Wisconsin, where slavery was banned by the Missouri Compromise. When he returned to Missouri, Scott went to court to win his freedom, arguing that his stay in Wisconsin had made him a free man.

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After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, settlers poured into Kansas. Most were peaceful farmers looking for good farmland, but some settlers moved to Kansas either to support or to oppose slavery. In the South, towns sent their young men to Kansas, and in the North, abolitionists raised money to send weapons to antislavery settlers. Before long, Kansas had two competing governments in the territory, one for slavery and one against it.

The struggle over slavery soon turned violent. On May 21, 1856, pro-slavery settlers and so-called “border ruffians” from Missouri invaded Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the antislavery government.

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After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, settlers poured into Kansas. Most were peaceful farmers looking for good farmland, but some settlers moved to Kansas either to support or to oppose slavery. In the South, towns sent their young men to Kansas, and in the North, abolitionists raised money to send weapons to antislavery settlers. Before long, Kansas had two competing governments in the territory, one for slavery and one against it.

The struggle over slavery soon turned violent. On May 21, 1856, proslavery settlers and so-called “border ruffians” from Missouri invaded Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the antislavery government.

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Northerners who were already horrified by slavery were roused to fury by two events in 1854: the publication of the so-called Ostend Manifesto and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The document known as the Ostend Manifesto was a message sent to the secretary of state by three American diplomats who were meeting in Ostend, Belgium. President Franklin Pierce, who had taken office in 1853, had been trying to purchase the island of Cuba from Spain, but Spain had refused the offer. The message from the diplomats urged the U.S. government to seize Cuba by force if Spain continued to refuse to sell the island. When the message was leaked to the public, angry Northerners charged that Pierce's administration wanted to buy Cuba in order to add another slave state to the Union.

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People in the North and the South were unhappy with the Fugitive Slave Act, though for different reasons.Northerners did not want to enforce the act, whereas Southerners felt the act did not do enough to ensure the return of their escaped property. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, a person arrested as a runaway slave had almost no legal rights. Many runaways fled all the way to Canada rather than risk being caught and sent back to their owners.Others decided to stand and fight. Reverend Jermain Loguen, a former slave living

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On January 21, 1850, Henry Clay, now a senator from Kentucky, trudged through a Washington snowstorm to pay a call on  senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Clay, the creator of the Missouri Compromise, had a new plan to end the deadlock over California, but he needed Webster's support to get his plan through Congress.

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For the next three years, Congress debated what to do about slavery in the territory gained from Mexico. Southerners wanted all of the Mexican cession open for slavery, but the Northerners wanted it closed.

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The gag rule kept the slavery issue out of congress for ten years. Then in 1846, President James Polk sent a bill to Congress asking for funds for the war with Mexico.

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Nat Turner's rebellion was one of the largest slave revolts, but individual slaves also continued to rebel by running away to freedom in the North. These Fugitives from slavery were often helped in their escape by sympathetic people in the North.

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As John Quincy Adams predicted, for a time the "contest" over slavery was settled. However, a powerful force was building that soon pushed the issue into the open again: The Second Great Awakening.

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An agreement made by Congress in 1820 which Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Maine was admitted as a free state It also created a imaginary line in which any state north of this line would be a free state and any state south of the line was a slave state