1. Short Answer Questions
1. Discuss the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. How did northerners attempt to prevent
its enforcement?
Northerners moderates accepted the Fugitive Slave Act as a price to pay to save the
Union. he law brought home to northerners the uncomfortable truth that the
continuation of slavery depended on their complicity. By legalizing the activities
of slave-catchers on northern soil, the law reminded northerners that slavery was
a national problem, not merely a peculiar southern institution.
2. What were the provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act? Why did it anger and alarm
many northerners?
The origins of the act lay in the seemingly uncontroversial desire of farm families
to establish homesteads west of Iowa and Missouri. This act would also link railroads out
to the far west. Antislavery northerners assailed the bill as “an atrocious plot” to violate
the “sacred pledge” of the Missouri Compromise and to turn Kansas into a “dreary region
of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”
3. What brought about civil war in Kansas in 1856?
Kansas became a battlefield between proslavery and antislavery forces.
4.
Explain Lincoln’s position on slavery when he ran for Senate in 1858 and for president in 1860.
Douglas used debates to portray Lincoln as an abolitionist. Lincoln, however was not.
He said that he is not in favor of bringing social and political equality amongst the white and
black man.
5. Explain the impact of John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid on the South’s mood and thought.