Hot topic Quote by Charles River Editors

The Free State men, myself among them, took it for granted that Missouri was a slave state.

— Buffalo Bill

“The Constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South and moneyed interests of the North. For the purpose of uniting the thirteen…

— Howard Zinn

New states were supposed to join the union when they reached a certain population, but in the late 19th century, population mattered a great…

— Heather Cox Richardson

“Down our way we're always had a theory that the Civil War was not brought on by Secession of Slavery or the State's Rights…

— Irvin S. Cobb

“The Compromise of 1850 was authored by the legendary Whig politician Henry Clay. In addition to admitting California to the Union as a free…

— Charles River Editors

“Meanwhile, the issue of whether Kansas would be admitted to the union as a slave or free state was to be decided by popular…

— Lance T. Stewart

“James Tallmadge of New York was the first to try to address this issue by limiting slavery in Missouri, and the Tallmadge Amendment sought…

— Charles River Editors

When we acquired California and New- Mexico this party, scorning all compromises and all concessions, demanded that slavery should be forever excluded from them,…

— Robert Toombs

In the 1850s, as the numbers of Americans who were not invested in the slave system grew, the South's leaders felt they had to…

— Heather Cox Richardson

From that date the abandonment of the older State proceeded with a rapidity never before known, and with it grew the domestic slave trade…

— Henry Charles Carey

The systematic, wanton, and long continued agitation of the slavery question, with the actual and threatened aggressions of the Northern States and a portion…

— Isham G. Harris

“...[at the Constitutional Convention] the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not…

— James Madison