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Southern Democrats supported Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill, introduced in January 1854, which proposed to repeal the Missouri Compromise line, thereby possibly opening the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery on the basis of popular…

This lithograph by Currier & Ives, an American printmaking firm based in New York, satirized President Zachary Taylor's attempts to balance southern and northern interests in 1850 as they related to slavery in the territories gained in the Mexican…

Anthony Burns, a slave, escaped Virginia and fled to Massachusetts. He was captured and returned to slavery. He later spoke at a black church in New York in February of 1855. In this speech, published subsequently in newspapers, he gave his account…