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The idea that people could decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery.

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California was able to enter the Union as a free state.

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Surveyed Between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the resolution of a border dispute involving Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware in Colonial America.

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The nation formed by the southern states when they seceded from the Union, also known as the Confederacy.

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An agreement proposed by Henry Clay that allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a Slave state and Maine to enter as free state and outlawed slavery in any territories or states north of 36'30' latitude.

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An antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe that spoke out powerfully against slavery.

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The convention adjourned to Charleston to draft an ordinance of secession. When the ordinance was adopted on December 20,1860, South Carolina became the first slave state in the south to declare that it had seceded form the US.

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A plan that would divide the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase into two territories-Kansas and Nebraska-and allow people in each territory to decide on the question of slavery.

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Sound Smart: The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 | History

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A landmark decision of the US Supreme Court in which the Court held that the US Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for black people, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and therefor the rights and privileges is confers upon American citizens could never apply to them.

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An Illinois lawyer that warned that a future court ruling, or what he called "the next Dred Scott decision," would prohibit states from banning slavery.

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On May 24, 1856, John Brown, an abolitionist, and his men killed five pro-slavery men in Kansas.

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John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was an effort to initiate an armed slave revolt in 1859 by taking over a United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

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A network of people who helped thousands of enslaved people escape to the North by providing transportation and hiding places.

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Digital Story: Secrets  and Codes of the Underground Railroad

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This act made it a crime to help runaway slaves and allowed officials to arrest those slaves in free areas.