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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. The Senate committee held its first meeting on December 20, 1860. Just as the senators began their work, events in two distant cities dashed their hopes for a settlement.

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Douglas's final version of the bill, known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was passed in 1854 and created two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. It also abolished the Missouri Compromise by leaving it up to the settlers themselves to vote on whether to permit slavery in the two territories. Douglas called this policy popular sovereignty, or rule by the people. The Kansas-Nebraska Act hit the North like a thunderbolt. Once again, Northerners were haunted by visions of slavery marching across the plains. Douglas tried to calm their fears by saying that the climates of Kansas and Nebraska were not suited to slave labor, but when Northerners studied maps, they were not so sure.

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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.

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The violence in Kansas greatly disturbed Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. To Sumner, it was proof of what he had long suspected—that Senator Stephen Douglas had plotted with Southerners to make Kansas a slave state. In 1856, Sumner voiced his suspicions in a passionate speech called “The Crime Against Kansas.” In harsh, shocking language, Sumner described the “crime against Kansas” as a violent assault on an innocent territory, “compelling it to the hateful embrace of 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. 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. He declared, “The real issue in this controversy . . . is the sentiment of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong."

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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. And that, wrote a South Carolina newspaper, would mean “the loss of liberty, property, home, country—everything that makes life worth having.”

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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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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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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.

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Henry Clay and Daniel Webster hoped the Compromise of 1850 would quiet the slavery controversy for years to come. In fact, it satisfied almost no one—and the debate grew louder each year.

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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 to slavery, but Northerners wanted all of it closed. As a compromise, Southerners proposed a bill that would extend the Missouri Compromise line all the way to the Pacific. Slavery would be banned north of that line and allowed south of it.Northerners in Congress rejected this proposal.

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Southerners felt that something needed to be done so they could get a slave back if it ran away because when the lost a slave it felt like they lost some of their land. Southerners even compared northerner sto bank robbers because they helped slaves escape and they thought they were helping they property leave and southerns are losing their property.

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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. Leaders of this early-1800s religious revival promised that God would bless those who did the Lord's work. For some Americans, the Lord's work was the abolition of slavery.

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The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. In this way, it maintained the balance of power between slave states and free states. At the same time congress drew an imaginary line across the Louisiana purchase at latitude 36 30'. North of this line, slavery was to be banned forever, except in Missouri, whereas slave holding was permitted  south of the line.

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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.Pennsylvania representative David Wilmot added an amendment to the bill known as the Wilmot Proviso. The Wilmot Proviso stated that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist” in any part of the territory that might be acquired from Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American War.