• Examine the image.• Write 3 observations and 2 inferences. Label each.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

• Nat Turner, a slave and Baptist preacher in Southampton,Virginia, believed God chose him to lead a rebellion– Saw a solar eclipse in February 1831 as a sign

• On August 21, 1831, Turner and 7 other slaves killed their master and his family to start rebellion that left 55 whites dead

• Turner wanted a massive rebellion, but only 75 joined his fight and a militia of over 3,000 stopped them

• In retaliation, over 100 innocent slaves were killed• Turner was captured and hung on November 11, 1831

War for Texas Independence• Mexico, which owned Texas,

invited Americans to settle and farm in Texas in the 1820s

• When about 20,000 white Americans and 4,000 slaves settled in Texas, they pushed for independence

• Americans fought and won a war with Mexico, creating the independent Republic of Texas in 1836

• Texas became a US state in 1845

US President James Polk wanted to expand America to the Pacific Oceanbelief that America had a right to extend from “sea to shining sea” was called “manifest destiny”

After Mexico refused to sell its land to the US, Polk started a war with Mexico to get the land in 1846

The US won the Mexican-American War and negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, giving it a huge portion of land all the way to the Pacific Ocean

The question now was: Would this land be slave or free?

Compromise of 1850• Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel

Webster, and Stephen Douglas negotiated the Compromise of 1850 to determine what to do with the new land from the war with Mexico:1. California became a free state2. New Mexico and Utah would decide whether to be free

or slave; this was called “popular sovereignty”3. Texas gave part of its land to New Mexico for $10

million4. Slave trade in Washington, D.C. was abolished5. A new Fugitive Slave Act was passed

Publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852

• Novel focuses on Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave, and shows the harsh reality of slavery while arguing Christian love can overcome slavery

• Best-selling novel of 19th century; many white Americans learned of harsh treatment of slaves by reading the book

• Legend has it that Lincoln said, “so this is the little lady who started the great war” when he met her in 1862

Bleeding Kansas• By the early 1850s, settlers wanted to

move into Kansas and the area now known as Nebraska

• Southern states' representatives in Congress didn’t want a Nebraska territory because the land lay north of the 36°30' parallel — where slavery had been outlawed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820

• Stephen Douglas of Illinois passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, allowing the people of Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether the land would be free or slave (popular sovereignty)

• On the Kansas and Missouri border, anti-slavery and pro-slavery settlers fought in bloody battles called “Bleeding Kansas”; 56 people died

• Northerners got pissed, the Republican Party formed to oppose the act, and Lincoln got back into politics to take down popular sovereignty

Dred Scott v. Sandford• Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in

the free state of Illinois and the freeterritory of Wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of Missouri, had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom

• In 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all blacks -- slaves as well as free -- were not and could never become citizens of the United States– The court also declared the 1820 Missouri

Compromise unconstitutional, thus allowing slavery in all of the country's territories.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

• On a late night in 1859, John Brown and 21 armed followers snuck into Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now part of West Virginia)

• They took 60 prominent locals hostage and seized the town's US-owned weapons

• The men--among them 3 free blacks, 1 freed slave, and 1 fugitive slave--hoped to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an "army of emancipation”

• The next day, Colonel Robert E. Lee's troops stormed the building and Brown was caught

• Brown was convicted of murder, slave insurrection, and treason and sentenced to death by hanging; he lost two sons in the raid

Election of Abraham Lincoln• Lincoln, everyone’s second choice, was nominated

as the Republican candidate on the 3rd ballot• Lincoln defeated a split Democratic Party to win the

election of 1860• Just over a month after the election, South Carolina

seceded (left) from the Union (the US)