Slavery & the Road to the Civil War

What you’ll learn

• Chattel slavery treated kidnapped Africans and their descendants as property, which shaped the economy, the law, and family life.
• Abolitionists used newspapers, books, speeches, lawsuits, and sometimes violence. Southern leaders worried that each tactic weakened slavery.
• The Missouri Compromise used a map line to limit slavery, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act erased that line and invited violent fights over voting.
• The Fugitive Slave Act spread slave-catching into Northern communities, endangered free African Americans, and drove many people to protest or disobey the law.
• Bleeding Kansas showed that popular sovereignty failed when armed groups stuffed ballot boxes and answered politics with raids.
• The Dred Scott decision pleased many slaveholders but alarmed Northerners who thought the Supreme Court had gone too far.