Chapter 19 Multiple Choice
Congressman Preston Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the Senate floor because
Sumner had used abusive language to describe the South and a South Carolina senator.
As submitted to Congress, the Lecompton Constitution was designed to
bring Kansas into the Union, while marking it impossible to prohibit slavery there.
Within two months after the election of Lincoln
seven southern states had seceded and formed the Confederate States of America.
The election of 1856 was most noteworthy for
the dramatic rise of the Republican party.
Harriet Beecher's Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
was strongly rooted in religiously based antislavery sentiments.
The financial and economic collapse of 1857 increased northern anger at the South's refusal to support
higher tariffs and free western homesteads for farmers.
Lincoln rejected the proposed Crittenden Compromise primarily because
it left open the possibility that slavery could expand south into Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean.
The fanatical abolitiionist John Brown made his first entry into violent antislavery politics by
killing five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas.
Southerners were particularly enraged by the John Brown affair because
northerners' celebration of Brown as a martyr seemed to indicate their support for slave insurrection.
During the campaign of 1860, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party
opposed the expansion of slavery but did not threaten to attack slavery in the South.
In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court
ruled that Congress culd not prohibit slavery in any of the territories because slaves were private propety of which owners would not be deprived.
Hinton R. Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South contended that
slavery did great harm to the poor whites of the South.
In the campaign of 1860, the Democratic party
split in two, with each faction nominating its own presidential candidate.
The crucial Freeport Question that Lincoln demanded that Douglas answer during their debates was whether
the people of a territory could prohibit slavery in light of the Dred Scott decision.
Southerners were especially enraged by abolitionists' funding of antislavery settlers in Kansas.
Douglas's Kansas-Nebraksa had seemed to imply that Knasas would become a slave state.