A Compromise Tariff Act is passed as a means of gradually reducing the tariffs of concern in the southern states. Confrontation is averted with this compromise.
The House passes a resolution that automatically tables or postponed action on all petitions relating to slavery without hearing them. Stricter versions of this gag rule are passed in succeeding Congresses.
Congress passes law banning the importation of any new slaves into the United States effective January 1, 1808. This enraged many southern slave owners.
Abraham Lincoln is elected president. Lincoln received 40% of the popular vote and won 59% of the Electoral votes. He was not even on the ballot in the deep south.
Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner delivers a speech attacking slavery supporters in the Senate. He singles out Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in his speech. Two days later, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, Butler's nephew, attacks Sumner on the Senate floor and beats him with a cane. Sumner took three years to recover.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act passes Congress and overturns the Missouri Compromise, opening the Northern territory to slavery. Both side send settlers into the areas in an effort to influence the future conditions of these areas.
Congress implements several measures forming the Compromise of 1850. The measures included California joining the Union as a free state, the territories of New Mexico and Utah are organized with no restrictions on slavery, slave trading is abolished in the District of Columbia effective January 1851 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 is modified and strengthened to allow slaveholders to retrieve slaves in northern states and free territories.
Abolitionist publisher Elijah P. Lovejoy is murdered in Alton, Illinois and his printing press is thrown in the river. He had been calling for an end to slavery.
William Lloyd Garrison publishes the first issue of the abolitionist journal, the Liberator.
The Liberator speaks out against slavery, many northerners supported this journal.
The Missouri Compromise is discussed, allowing Maine to be a part of the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state in 1821. This will keep a balance between free and slave states. The compromise establishes the 36 degree, 30 degree as a dividing line between free and slave regions of the territories.
The first organized protest against slavery in the new world was started by a group of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Known as the Germantown Protest, it argued that Christians should do to others as they would want to be done to them, that slavery was primarily theft as you were buying something stolen and that adultery is wrong yet slave traders/owners forced adultery on men and women by breaking up marriages when they resold husbands and wives to different owners.
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