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![[Dividing the] National [Map]. [Cincinnati], 1860. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-33122)](http://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/aggregate-208x148/essay-images/33122u.synop_.web_.jpg "Political cartoon depicting the four presidential candidates in the election of 1860 tearing the country apart. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)")
Essay
The Road to War
‘A house divided against itself can not stand’ I believe this government can not endure permanently, half slave, and half free . . . I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided . . . Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and put it in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old, as well as new.
—Abraham...
Glossary Term – Event
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which overturned the Missouri Compromise. This opened Kansas and Nebraska to white settlement and allowed popular sovereignty to determine slave- or free-state status in territories seeking statehood. The act destroyed the Whig Party, divided the Democratic Party, and prompted the creation the Republican Party. The author of this legislation was Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had pushed the Compromise of 1850 through Congress. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Douglas had proposed...
Glossary Term – Place
36°30′ line
The 36°30′ line was the latitude designated by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as the boundary between free and slave territory in the Louisiana Purchase. In the Compromise, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, and slavery was banned in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30′ line. That boundary became meaningless, however, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Compromise and employed popular sovereignty in determining slave or free status in the territory.
Interactive
Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation
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Abraham Lincoln's views on slavery and its abolition were clearly expressed in speeches and action throughout his political career. This online exhibition, based on a document booklet of the same title produced in partnership with President Lincoln's Cottage at the Soldiers' Home in Washington DC (...
Interactive
Excerpts from American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation
Excerpts from American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to EmancipationEdited by James G. Basker
These excerpts were chosen from more than 215 selections by 158 authors in the anthology.
Teaching Resource
Legislation
Legislation Compromise of 1820 Admitted Maine to the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, but prohibited slavery in all other parts of the Louisiana...
Teaching Resource
Examining Antebellum Elections
Aim
What can the statistics tell us about the rise and fall of the second two-party system? How did the breakdown of this system contribute to the onset of the Civil War?
OverviewIt is appropriate in this presidential election year to examine the antebellum era through the lens of elections and electoral politics.Although an “era of good feeling” had followed the War of 1812, signs of political dissension were appearing as early as the presidential election of 1824. The issues contested in elections and...