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The slaves in question are Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children on the farm, and Harry, the young son of Mrs. Shelby's maid Eliza. When Shelby tells his wife about his agreement with Haley, she is appalled because she has promised Eliza that Shelby would not sell her son.

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Electoral college had gone against the entire southern half of america leaving the nation divided. Democratic pro slave states questioned there representation within the union, and most believed the electoral college was biased for northern states.

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The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husband by their masters. The Negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. The free laborer must work or starve. He is more a slave than the Negro because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of his life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right.

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John Brown was a radical abolitionist who believed in the violent overthrow of the slavery system. During the Bleeding Kansas conflicts, Brown and his sons led attacks on pro-slavery residents. Justifying his actions as the will of God, Brown soon became a hero in the eyes of Northern extremists and was quick to capitalize on his growing reputation. By early 1858, he had succeeded in enlisting a small "army" of insurrectionists whose mission was to foment rebellion among the slaves. In 1859, Brown and 21 of his followers attacked and occupied the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry. Their goal was to capture supplies and use them to arm a slave rebellion. Brown was captured during the raid and later hanged, but not before becoming an anti-slavery icon.

Abolitionist and insurrectionist. Born in Torrington, Connecticut, Brown spent his boyhood in Ohio, where he mingled from the first with dedicated opponents of slavery. While his professional life featured a series of business failures, his family responsibilities grew even as his abolitionist principles deepened.

Did you know? John Brown declared bankruptcy at age 42 and had more than 20 lawsuits filed against him.

In 1855, after assisting the escape of several slaves, Brown and his five sons moved to Kansas just after that territory had been opened for the possible expansion of slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Joining the struggle there between proslavery and Free-Soil settlers, Brown appointed himself "captain" of the antislavery forces on Osawatomie Creek. (The struggle arose out of a long-standing disagreement between North and South over slavery's expansion that had its roots in the framing of the Constitution.) When proslavery forces sacked the "free state" town of Lawrence, guerrilla warfare ensued. The success of the proslavery guerrillas inspired Brown, with four of his sons and two other accomplices, to murder five reputedly proslavery settlers who lived along Pottawottamie Creek. Justifying his action as obedience to the will of a just God, Brown soon became a hero in the eyes of northern extremists and was quick to capitalize on his growing reputation. By early 1858 he had succeeded in enlisting a small "army" of insurrectionists, including three of his sons, whose mission was to foment rebellion among the slaves.

Brown had toyed with the idea for years, but it took form after a meeting of Brown and his followers in the free black community of Chatham, Ontario, in the winter of 1858. He proposed to provoke a black insurrection through armed intervention in northern Virginia, thereby establishing a stronghold to which escapees could flee and from which further insurrection might be spawned. Meanwhile, mounting frustration over the failure to achieve peaceful emancipation made many abolitionists receptive to Brown's violent approach. Some of them, known subsequently as the "secret six"-Franklin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, George Luther Stearns, Gerrit Smith, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Theodore Parker-were aware of his intentions and became his financial supporters. Others, however, contributed funds and good wishes while remaining studiously ignorant of Brown's exact plans. Early in 1859, he rented a farm near Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), collected weapons and his "army," and on October 16 with twenty-one followers attacked and occupied the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry. Quickly surrounded by militia commanded by Col. Robert E. Lee, Brown's position was overrun, ten of his followers were killed, and Brown himself was wounded and captured.

News of the raid electrified the North and outraged the white South. Brown was tried and convicted of treason. He conducted his defense with extraordinary astuteness, conveying to supporters and sympathizers the appearance of a powerfully inspired and selfless religious martyr. Popular expression of support for Brown was widespread in the North (the best remembered of which is Henry David Thoreau's "Plea for Captain John Brown") before he was hanged on December 2, 1859. In the South, his execution did little to allay spreading fears of slave insurrection and a growing conviction that northern opponents of slavery would continue to stimulate insurrection. Many analysts then and since have concluded that Brown's raid did much to hasten the coming of the Civil War.

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
The groundbreaking series reimagined. ROOTS premieres Memorial Day at 9/8c on HISTORY.

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John Brown was a radical abolitionist who believed in the violent overthrow of the slavery system. During the Bleeding Kansas conflicts, Brown and his sons led attacks on pro-slavery residents. Justifying his actions as the will of God, Brown soon became a hero in the eyes of Northern extremists and was quick to capitalize on his growing reputation.

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Matthew Pinsker gives a crash course on the Compromise of 1850, the resolution to a dispute over slavery in territory gained after the Mexican-American War.

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By this time the nation had reached its boiling point. With the election of 1860 leaving Democrats beyond angry pro slavery states, groups, and politicians where ready to secede from the union. The death and destruction that would follow would be the bloodiest in American history.

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Bleeding Kansas was a series of violent political confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 involving anti-slavery "Free-Staters" and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian", or "southern" elements in Kansas. At the heart of the conflict was the question of whether Kansas would allow or outlaw slavery, and thus enter the Union as a slave state or a free state.

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To Northerners, this decision was like a declaration of war on all of the ideals and freedoms awarded them by their states and territories, which stood opposed to the institution of slavery.

To Southerners, they saw it as the ultimate vindication of their practice of slavery, and as the front page of the Daily Morning News of Savannah, Georgia, proclaimed, "the series of decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case, is of more vital importance in reference to the settlement of the slavery question than any or all the other acts and proceedings upon this subject- legislative and judicial, State or Federal- since the organization of the Federal Government."

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This primary source illustrates the distinct separation of the area of slave sates in the south and the free states in the north after the Missouri Compromise.

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This document shows the effects the fugitive slave law had on the people of color during this time, it is warning people of color to watch out for slave hunters and kidnappers, it also says they should avoid talking with police men.

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The Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Scott, a slave who had spent part of his life in non-slave territory, could not sue for his freedom in a federal court because, as the March 7th New York Times summarized, “Negroes, whether slaves or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.”

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Reynolds’s political map of the United States, designed to exhibit the comparative area of the free and slave states and the territory open to slavery or freedom by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

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Relief shown by hachures. Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as a raster image. Includes statistics from the 1850 census and ill.

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The transcript of the Missouri compromise was used to authorize the people of the Missouri territory to form a constitution and state government, and for the admission of such state into the Union on an equal footing with the original states, and to prohibit slavery in certain territories.

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Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions on January 29, 1850, in an attempt to seek a compromise and avert a crisis between North and South. 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 following is a link to a primary source of the Missouri Compromise

https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=22&page=transcript

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The Lincoln Douglas Debates, also known as the Great Debates of 1858, were as series of seven debates in which Lincoln and Douglas argued over handling several issues the most important being slavery. Lincoln was trying to win the general assembly for The republicans and Douglas for the democrats.