Kentucky senator Henry Clay introduced the set of resolutions in 1850 that became the basis of the compromise over the Mexican Cession.
Missing Word
Clay
Clay, long known as the Great Compromiser, offered a package of measures on California, Texas, the District of Columbia, and fugitives, though he left the final push to others.
Category: Compromise of 1850
Question 2
Too ill to speak, South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun had a colleague read his 1850 speech blaming the North for the sectional crisis.
Missing Word
Calhoun
Calhoun, the South's leading defender of slavery, demanded a stronger fugitive slave law and hinted at disunion; he died later that month.
Category: Compromise of 1850
Question 3
New York senator William H. Seward declared in 1850 that a higher law than the Constitution condemned slavery.
Missing Word
Seward
Seward's appeal to a higher moral law made him one of the most prominent antislavery voices in the Senate.
Category: Compromise of 1850
Question 4
Illinois senator Stephen Douglas steered the measures of 1850 through Congress by breaking them into five separate bills.
Missing Word
Douglas
Douglas won passage by assembling a different majority for each bill, since no single majority would support the whole package.
Category: Compromise of 1850
Question 5
Vice President Millard Fillmore became president when Zachary Taylor died in July 1850, and he supported the compromise measures.
Missing Word
Fillmore
Taylor had opposed the compromise, so his death and Fillmore's support cleared the way for the bills to become law.
Category: Compromise of 1850
Question 6
Harriet Beecher Stowe drew on stories she heard while living in Ohio to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Missing Word
Stowe
Stowe's novel showed slavery destroying families and corrupting slaveholders, and it shaped Northern opinion even though women could not vote.
Category: Fugitive Slave Act
Question 7
Harriet Tubman returned to the South many times to guide family members and others out of slavery.
Missing Word
Tubman
Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland and became the best-known guide on the Underground Railroad, leading many enslaved people to freedom.
Category: Fugitive Slave Act
Question 8
In 1852, Democrat Franklin Pierce won the presidency by defeating the Whig candidate, General Winfield Scott.
Missing Word
Pierce
Pierce favored expansion and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, and he signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.
Category: Kansas-Nebraska Act
Question 9
In May 1856, a proslavery posse sacked the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, destroying newspaper presses and burning a hotel.
Missing Word
Lawrence
The attack on Lawrence was a turning point in Bleeding Kansas, prompting John Brown's killings at Pottawatomie Creek days later.
Category: Kansas-Nebraska Act
Question 10
Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was beaten with a cane in the Senate chamber after a speech attacking slavery in Kansas.
Missing Word
Sumner
Sumner's injuries kept him from the Senate for a long time, and Northerners saw the assault as proof of Southern violence; Massachusetts reelected him.
Category: Kansas-Nebraska Act
Question 11
Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857.
Missing Word
Taney
Taney's opinion held that Black people could not be citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, enraging Republicans.
Category: Dred Scott and Debates
Question 12
Michigan Democrat Lewis Cass, his party's presidential nominee in 1848, championed popular sovereignty in the territories.
Missing Word
Cass
Cass argued that territorial settlers, not Congress, should decide on slavery, an idea Stephen Douglas later built into the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Category: Compromise of 1850
Question 13
John Bell of Tennessee ran in 1860 as the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, which promised to preserve the Union and quiet the slavery debate.
Missing Word
Bell
Bell drew support in the border states and carried Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, but his party offered no clear plan for settling the crisis.
Category: Election of 1860
Question 14
In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown led an armed band in seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Missing Word
Brown
Brown hoped to spark an uprising of enslaved people; Southerners saw him as a terrorist, while many antislavery Northerners mourned him as a martyr after his execution.
Category: Election of 1860
Question 15
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election even though his name did not appear on the ballot in many Southern states.
Missing Word
Lincoln
Lincoln's victory as the Republican candidate, opposed to the spread of slavery, led South Carolina and other Deep South states to secede.
Category: Election of 1860