Timeline and Terms

Events

Alabama seceded
Attack on Fort Sumter
Charles Sumner assaulted in the Senate
Compromise of 1850
Confederate call for volunteers
Confederate States of America formed
Crittenden Compromise
Declaration of South Carolina
Dred Scott decision
Florida seceded
Georgia seceded
Jefferson Davis chosen president of Confederate states
John Brown executed
John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry
Kansas admitted to Union
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Last slaves returned under Fugitive Slave Law
Lincoln elected president
Lincoln inaugurated
Lincoln-Douglas debates
Lincoln-Douglas debates published
Louisiana seceded
Meeting of Confederate Congress
Mississippi’s secession
Missouri Compromise
North Carolina seceded
Secession conventions held
Secession of Arkansas
Secession of Texas
Secession of Virginia
South Carolina considered secession
South Carolina’s secession
Southern resignations in Senate and House
Tennessee seceded
Territorial elections in Kansas
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Violence in “Bleeding Kansas”
Vote against secession in Delaware
Vote against secession in Missouri
Vote for neutrality in Kentucky
Wilmot Proviso introduced

People

Abraham Lincoln
Benjamin Butler
Charles Sumner
Dred Scott
Frederick Douglass
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Horace Greeley
James Buchanan
Jefferson Davis
John Brown
John J. Crittenden
Julia Ward Howe
Robert E. Lee
Sam Houston
Stephen A. Douglas
Thaddeus Stevens
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Wendell Phillips

Places

36°30′ line
Bleeding Kansas
Border States
Harpers Ferry
Mason-Dixon Line

Organizations

Confederate States of America
Radical Republicans