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Meanwhile, in Charleston, South Carolina, delegates attending a state convention voted that same day—December 20, 1860—to leave the Union. The city went wild as church bells rang and crowds filled the streets, roaring their approval. A South Carolina newspaper boldly proclaimed, “The Union Is Dissolved!” Six more states soon followed South Carolina's lead, and in February 1861, those states joined together as the Confederate States of America.

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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. 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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Rather than wait for Congress to act, Brown planned to seize the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. John brown attempted to seize the federal arsenal because he wanted to are the slaves for a rebellion. Such words filled white Southerners with fear because it was Southern blood that would be spilled if a slave rebellion began. The fact that many Northerners viewed Brown as a hero also left white Southerners uneasy.

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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. Lincoln lost the election. However, the debates were widely reported, and they helped make him a national figure. His argument with Douglas also brought the moral issue of slavery into sharp focus. Compromises over slavery were becoming impossible.

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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. The Dred Scott decision delighted slaveholders. They hoped that, at long last, the issue of slavery in the territories had been settled—and in their favor.

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In 1856, Sumner voiced his suspicions in a passionate speech called “The Crime Against Kansas.” Just what Sumner hoped to accomplish was not clear. However, copies of his speech were quickly printed up for distribution in the North. 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. Reactions to the attack on Sumner showed how divided the country had become. Many Southerners applauded Brooks for defending the honor of his family and the South.

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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 raid on Lawrence provoked a wave of outrage in the North.People raised money to replace the destroyed presses, and more “Free-Soilers,” as antislavery settlers were called, prepared to move to Kansas.

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Douglas wanted to get a railroad built to California. He thought the project was more likely to happen if Congress organized the Great Plains into the Nebraska Territory and opened the region to settlers. 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.

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The Fugitive Slave Act also said that any person who helped a slave escape, or even refused to aid slave catchers, could be jailed.This provision, people complained, would force many Northerners to become slave catchers. A person arrested as a runaway slave had almost no legal rights.Northerners' refusal to support the act infuriated slaveholders, and it also made enforcement of the act almost impossible.

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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. It began by admitting California to the Union as a free state, which would please the North. Meanwhile, it allowed the New Mexico and Utah territories to decide whether to allow slavery, which would please the South.

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Then, late in 1849, California applied for admission to the Union as a free state. Northerners in Congress welcomed California with open arms, but Southerners rejected California's request. Making California a free state, they warned, would upset the balance between slave and free states. The result would be unequal representation of slave states and free states in Congress.

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The gag rule kept the slavery issue out of congress for 10 years. Southerners in congress strongly opposed to Wilmot's amendment and maintained that congress had no right to decide where slaveholders could take their property.

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Individual slaves continued to rebel by running away, this act was bad for slave owners. Every slave owner saw their slaves as a valuable piece of land. When the slaves left they were losing more money. To slaveholders northerners were no better than bank robbers.

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congress got flooded by anti- slavery petitions. The " Gag- Rule" was made to prevent the anti- slavery proposal. Adams signed a proposal saying that nobody could be born into slavery after 1842.

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An agreement made by congress in 1820 under which Missouri was admitted to the union as a slave state and Maine was admitted as a free state. An imaginary line was created to make sure all states north were free states and all stated north were slave to keep the balance equal.