Abolitionist Movement and how it led to the Civil War
... slavery and encouraged the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Opposition to events in Kansas, together with resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, helped create a more aggressive tension of abolitionism. Free blacks joined many younger white abolitionists in aiding the escaping of slaves from the Southern states. A well-organized emigration effort called upon hundreds of antislavery settlers to venture toward Kansas and arm themselves with weapons to resist the proslavery movements there. John Brown emerged from the guerrilla skirmishing in "Bleeding Kansas." John Brown was committed to battling slavery through violent means; he received secret financial support from antislavery veterans, mainly from the small radical political abolitionist group to fund his movement. He set up a base in the Southern Appalachians to help escaping slaves. This plan turned into an unsuccessful attack on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859. On October 16, 1859, he led twenty-one men (five blacks and sixteen whites) on a raid of the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan was to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal. However local farmers, militiamen, and Marines led by Robert E. Lee captured and killed most of hi men within thirty-six hours of the attack. Despite John Brown’s contributions to the antislavery cause, he did not become a figure of significance until he followed five of his sons to the Kansas area. There, he became the leader of antislavery guerillas and fought a proslavery attack against the town of Lawrence. The following year, in revenge for another attack, Brown went to another proslavery town and brutally killed five of its settlers in front of their families. Brown and his sons would continue to fight in that area and in Missouri for the rest of the year. On the day of Brown's execution, bells were tolled and minute guns fired in many places in the North. Church services and public meetings were held for the purpose of exonerating his deeds and the cause he represented. The North, recognizing him as a martyr for the abolitionists used his name as a battle hymn, when Northern troops invaded and defeated the South. The famous Scott v. Sandford case was based on mainly one issue; whether Dred Scott, a former slave, now living in a free territory, was free. He had lived in a free territory because he had previously run away. After he had run away from his master, Mrs. Emerson, she passed away; therefore Scott proclaimed he was a free black. Scott filed a statement on April 6, 1846, stating that on April 4, Mrs. Emerson had beat, bruised, and mistreated him before punishing him for twelve hours. Scott also declared that he was free because of his residence at Fort Armstrong and Fort Snelling. He had optimism for the succession of his statement because the Missouri Supreme Court had freed many slaves who had traveled with their masters in free states before. In the Missouri Supreme Court's 1836 Rachel v. Walker ruling, they declared that Rachel, a slave taken to Fort Snelling and to Prairie du Chien in Illinois, was free. This previous case showed no avail to Scott; Mrs. Emerson won the first Scott v. Emerson trial by slipping through a technical loophole; therefore Scott took the second trial by closing the loophole. The case finally reached the Missouri Supreme Court, the same court that had freed Rachel just fourteen years earlier. Unfortunately for Scott, those fourteen years had been important in terms of sectional conflict and made his odds even smaller. Opponents tried to suppress antislavery agitation by outbursts against the church and the state and even through mob violence. W...