# data[].attributes.body
Slavery, condition in which one human being was owned by another.

# data[].attributes.body
In the wake of the Mexican War, tensions developed between the North and South over whether the western land gained by the U.S. should become free or slave territory.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sound Smart: Compromise of 1850 | History

# data[].attributes.body
One of those who went to Kansas was a radical abolitionist and religious zealot named John Brown, who had worked as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and founded an organization that helped slaves escape to Canada.

# data[].attributes.body
The election of the first U.S. president who was a vocal opponent of slavery came as a shock to Southerners. “Now, there is going to be someone in the White House who is not going to do what the South says it wants done, reflexively,” Green explains.

# data[].attributes.body
Dred Scott, an enslaved man, was born in Virginia and later lived in Alabama and Missouri. In 1831, his original enslaver died, and he was purchased by a U.S. Army surgeon named John Emerson. Emerson took him to the free state of Illinois and also Wisconsin, a territory where slavery was illegal due to the Missouri Compromise.

# data[].attributes.body
Brown dreamed of carrying out an even bigger attack, one that would ignite a mass uprising of Southern enslaved people. On a night in October 1859, he and a band of 22 men launched a raid on Harpers Ferry, a town in what is now West Virginia, and captured some prominent local citizens and seized the federal arsenal there. His small force soon was counterattacked by local militia, forcing him to seek refuge.

# data[].attributes.body
Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer who had served a single term in Congress, emerged in the mid-1850s as an articulate and persuasive critic of slavery, and achieved national prominence with a series of debates against Senator Stephen Douglas in an unsuccessful campaign for Douglas’s seat.

# data[].attributes.body
In 1851, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was still grieving the loss of her 18-month-old son Samuel to cholera two years earlier, wrote to the publisher of a Washington, D.C.-based abolitionist newspaper, National Era, and offered to write a fictional serial about the cruelty of slavery.

# data[].attributes.body
In 1854, Senator Douglas, the author of the Compromise of 1850, introduced another piece of legislation “to organize the Territory of Nebraska,” an area that covered not just that present-day state but also Kansas, as well as Montana and the Dakotas, according to the U.S. Senate’s history of the law.

# data[].attributes.body
Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 1854 and 1859. It emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.

# data[].attributes.body
In 1858 Illinois Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln for the U.S.

Senate. His opponent was Democrat Stephen Douglas, who had repre-

sented Illinois in the Senate since 1847. Lincoln challenged Douglas in

what became the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates.

# data[].attributes.body
Lincoln insisted that he would not change slavery in the South. However,

he said that slavery could not expand and thus would eventually die out

completely. That idea angered many southerners.

# data[].attributes.body
Democrat Stephen Douglas had predicted that the Kansas-

Nebraska Act would “raise a . . . storm.” He was right. The

Kansas-Nebraska Act brought the slavery issue back into the

national spotlight. Some Whigs, Democrats, Free-Soilers, and

abolitionists joined in 1854 to form the Republican Party, a

political party united against the spread of slavery

in the West.