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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.

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With his opposition divided three ways, Lincoln sailed to victory, but it was an odd victory. 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.

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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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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.

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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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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.

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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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Northerners who were already horrified by slavery were roused to fury by two events in 1854,  the publication of the so-called Ostend Manifesto and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The document known as the Ostend Manifesto was a message sent to the secretary of state by three American diplomats who were meeting in Ostend, Belgium. President Franklin Pierce, who had taken office in 1853, had been trying to purchase the island of Cuba from Spain, but Spain had refused the offer.

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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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On January 21, 1850, Henry Clay, now a senator from Kentucky, trudged through a Washington snowstorm to pay a call on Senator. Clay, made a new compromise.

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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 Mexico Cession open slavery, but Northerners wanted all of it closed. Southerners proposed a bill that would extend the Missouri Compromise line all the way to the Pacific.

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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. There was a bill added called the Wilmot Proviso. Southerners in Congress strongly opposed Wilmot's amendment and maintained that Congress had no right to decide where slaveholders could take their property.

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Nat Turner's rebellion was one of the largest slave revolts. But,  individual slaves also continued to rebel by running away to freedom in the North. A fugitive slave is a person who flees or tries to escape.

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A powerful force was building that soon pushed the issue into the open again: the Second Great Awakening . Leaders of this early-1800's 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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For weeks, Congress struggled to find a way out of its deadlock over Missouri. So congress made an agreement under which Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave sate and Maine was admitted as a free state.

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The Missouri Compromise of 1820 (APUSH Review - Period 4)