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In August 1846, while Mexican War was still in progress, Polk asked Congress to appropriate $2 million for purchasing peace with Mexico. Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, an antislavery democrat, introduced an amendment to the appropriation bill prohibiting slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico.

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In January 1848, James Marshall, a carpenter working on onw of the rancher John Sutter's sawmills, found traces of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Sutter tried to suppress the news, fearing a gold rush would destroy his own substantial empire in the region. As soon as the news got out though, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world began flocking to California in a frantic search for gold.

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White vigilantes, who called themselves "Indian hunters," were already hunting down and killing thousands of Indians before the gold rush. Now a new state law permitted the arrest of "loitering" or orphaned Indians and their assignment to a term of "indentured" labor.

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One of the ways Franklin Pierce hoped to dampen sectional controversy was through his support of a movement in the Democratic Party known as "Young America". They believed the expansion of American democracy throughout the world as a way to divert attention from the controversies over slavery.

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The aging Henry Clay, (WAIT HOW IS HE STILL HERE??) who was spearheading the effort, believed that no compromise could last unless it settled all the issues in dispute between the sections. The Compromise of 1850 consists of five laws passed in September of 1850 that dealt with the issue of slavery and territorial expansion. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished.

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The Kansas-Nebraska Act was an 1854 bill that mandated “popular sovereignty”–allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state's borders.

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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 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.

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Among the most fervent abolitionists in Kansas was John Brown, a fiercely committed foe of slavery who considered himself and instrument of God’s will to destroy slavery. He moved to Kansas with his son so that they could fight to make it a free state. After the events in Lawrence, he gathered six followers and in one night murdered five pro-slavery settlers, leaving their bodies to discourage other supporters of slavery from entering Kansas. This bloody episode, known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, led to more civil strife in Kansas.

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Free-Soil Party, (1848–54), minor but influential political party in the pre-Civil War period of American history that opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. Fearful of expanding slave power within the national government, Rep. David Wilmot of Pennsylvania in 1846 introduced into Congress his famous Wilmot Proviso, calling for the prohibition of slavery in the vast southwestern lands that had been newly acquired from Mexico.

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This argument says that even if slavery is cruel and degrading, slaves are not fully human and so their suffering is as ethically important or unimportant as the suffering of domestic animals and they do not have any rights that would justify the abolition of slavery. (I didn't even want to type this... it's so disgusting.)

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Dred Scott decision, formally Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on March 6, 1857, ruled (7–2) that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′, was unconstitutional. The decision added fuel to the sectional controversy and pushed the country closer to civil war.

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The 1856 United States presidential election was the 18th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 4, 1856. In a three-way election, Democrat James Buchanan defeated Republican nominee John C. Frémont, and Know Nothing nominee Millard Fillmore.

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Lincoln believed that slavery was morally wrong, but he was not an abolitionist. That was partially because he could not envision any easy alternative to slavery in the areas where it had already existed. Lincoln and his party wanted to "arrest the further spread" of slavery- that is, prevent its expansion into the further territories.

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In 1859, John Brown, the antislavery zealot whose bloody actions in Kansas had inflamed the crisis there, staged an even more dramatic episode, this time in the South itself. With private encouragement and financial aid from prominent eastern abolitionists, he made elaborate plans to seize a mountain fortress in Virginia from which, he believed, he could foment a lave insurrection in the south. On October 16, he and a group of 18 followers attacked and seized control of a US arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. But the slave uprising Brown hoped to inspire did not occur, and he quickly found himself besieged by citizens, local militia companies, and, before long, men were killed, Brown surrendered. He was promptly tried in a Virginia court for treason against the state, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He and six of his other followers were hanged.

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Intensified by expansion and deepening regional divisions, debates over slaver slavery and other economic, cultural, and political issues led the nation into civil war.