Question

Write a report of 250 words on one of the following topics. Use at least two outside sources.

1. The Election of 1860
2. John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry
3. Bleeding Kansas
4. The Compromise of 1850
5. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Answer 1

Answer:

The United States had become increasingly divided during the 1850s over sectional disagreements, especially regarding the extension of slavery into the territories. Incumbent President James Buchanan, like his predecessor Franklin Pierce, was a northern Democrat with sympathies for the South. During the mid-to-late 1850s, the anti-slavery Republican Party became a major political force in the wake of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court's decision in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. By 1860, the Republican Party had replaced the defunct Whig Party as the major opposition to the Democrats. A group of former Whigs and Know Nothings formed the Constitutional Union Party, which sought to avoid secession by pushing aside the issue of slavery.