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The force of events moved very quickly upon the election of Lincoln. South Carolina acted first, calling for a convention to secede from the Union. State by state, conventions were held, and the Confederacy was formed. Within three months of Lincoln's election, seven states had seceded from the Union.

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On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States, beating Douglas, Breckenridge, and Bell. He was the first president from the Republican Party.

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John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. John Brown's raidon Harper's Ferry (also known as John Brown's raid or The raid on Harper's Ferry) was an effort by armed abolitionist John Brown to initiate an armed slave revolt in 1859 by taking over a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

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the Lincoln–Douglas debates (also known as The Great Debates of 1858) were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate.

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Dred Scott was a slave who sought his freedom through the American legal system. The 1857 decision by the United StatesSupreme Court in the Dred Scott case denied his plea, determining that no Negro, the term then used to describe anyone with African blood, was or could ever be a citizen.

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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.For white Southerners, the election of 1860 delivered an unmistakable message. The South was now in the minority. It no longer had the power to shape national events or policies, and Southerners feared that, sooner or later, Congress would try to abolish slavery.

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Rather than wait for Congress to act, Brown planned to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. 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.During the Lincoln - Douglas Debates , Douglas argued that the Dred Scott decision had put the slavery issue to rest, but Lincoln disagreed. In his eyes, slavery was a moral, not a legal, issue.

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Certainly, it was not about to die out in the memories of enraged Southerners. Two days after the speech, a relative of Senator Butler, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks, attacked Sumner in the Senate, beating him with his metal-tipped cane until it broke in half. By the time other senators could pull Brooks away, Sumner had collapsed, bloody and unconscious.

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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. Armed invaders burned a hotel, looted several homes, and tossed the printing press of an abolitionist newspaper into the Kansas River.

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The debate over would California join the union as a free or a slave state. if the state were to join it would upset the balance between the free and slave states.

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This was the debate over whether or not the new territories in the west would become free or slave states.

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Fugitive slaves are slaves that escaped their plantation and plantation owners. once they have done this they go along the underground railroad to get to freedom, some fugitive slaves include Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglas.

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As John Quincy Adams predicted, for a time the "contest" over slavery was settled. However a powerful force and building that soon pushed the issue into the Second Great Awakening . Leaders of this early 1800's religious revival promised that God would bless those who did the Lords work. For some Americans, the lords work was the abolition of slavery.

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In an effort to preserve the balance of power in Congress between slave and free states, the Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state.