Slavery, Sectionalism and the Road to War (1840–1860)

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Cotton — it made up over half of US exports and depended on enslaved labour.

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A system that treats enslaved people as property to be bought, sold, and owned, with no legal rights.

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An escaped enslaved woman who repeatedly returned South to guide others to freedom via the Underground Railroad.

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An armed uprising of enslaved people in Virginia that killed around 55 white people and led to harsher slave codes across the South.

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William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator demanding immediate emancipation; Frederick Douglass, an escaped enslaved man, became a leading Black abolitionist orator and writer.

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South Carolina declared a federal tariff void within its borders, asserting states' rights; President Andrew Jackson threatened force before a compromise ended it.

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The idea, championed by Stephen Douglas, that settlers in a new territory should vote themselves on whether to allow slavery.

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California admitted free, Utah/New Mexico decided by popular sovereignty, a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, and the slave trade (not slavery) banned in Washington DC.

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Violent conflict between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas after the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act let the territory decide slavery by popular vote.

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Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated slavery's expansion during an Illinois Senate race; Lincoln lost the seat but gained national fame.

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Lincoln won with almost no Southern electoral votes; the South saw this as proof it had lost control of the federal government, and South Carolina seceded in December 1860.

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Slavery was the deeper, root cause driving every major crisis (territorial expansion, compromises, the 1860 election); states' rights was the constitutional language used to defend slavery and justify secession.