Dred Scott was a slave born in Virginia at the turn of the century and in 1818 had moved with his master, Peter Blow, to a cotton plantation in Alabama. Twelve years later, the Blow family and their six slaves moved to St. Louis. In 1833, Scott was sold to Dr. John Emerson, an army doctor who took Scott with him as his personal servant to Fort Armstrong, Illinois. Two years later, Scott accompanied Emerson when he was transferred to Fort Snelling on the Minnesota River in Wisconsin Territory. Other moves followed, but in a few years Emerson returned Scott to St. Louis.

While Congress argued, violence raged in what people called "Bleeding Kansas." Northerners and southerners alike rushed weapons into the territory. An armed proslavery group burned part of the town of Lawrence, a center of the antislavery settlers. In revenge, a fanatical white abolitionist, John Brown, gathered an armed group, including his own sons, and murdered five unarmed proslavery men. The fighting over slavery and over disputed land claims took the lives of more than 200 men and women before federal troops moved in to restore order.

Men favoring slavery formed one territorial government in Kansas. Men opposed to slavery formed another. Raids and murders took place as law and order broke down. John Brown, a fanatical abolitionist, and his sons led an attack in which five proslavery settlers in Kansas were killed. Violence in "bleeding Kansas" added to the tensions now being felt in all parts of the country.

A group of New England writers that came to be known as transcendentalists believed that individuals should not conform to the materialistic world or to some abstract notion of religion. Instead, people should look within themselves for truth and guidance. The leading transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson – an essayist, poet, and lecturer – proclaimed that most Americans failed to lift their eyes from the mundane task of making a living. “We hear…too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts," Emerson wrote.

The caning of Sumner had repercussions in stife-torn Kansas.  John Brown, a devoted Bible-quoting Calvinist who believed he had a personal responsibility to overthrown slavery, announced that the time had come "to fight fire with fire" and "strike terror in the hearts of proslavery men." The next day, in reprisal for the 'sack of Lawrence' and the assault on Sumner, Brown and six companions dragged five proslavery men and boys from their beds at Pottawatomie Creek, spilt open their skulls with a sword, cut off their hands, and laid out their entrails.  A war of revenge erupted i

The antagonists in Kansas acted.  The roving Missourians who kept crossing the line carried weapons to back up their arguments.  New England abolitionists shipped boxes of rifles, "Beecher's Bibles," to the antislavery settlers.  (An eminent antislavery clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, had incautiously remarked that a rifle might be a more powerful moral agent on the Kansas plains than a Bible.)  Sporadic shootings and barn-burnings culminated, in May 1856, in a raid by Missouri "border ruffians" on the free-soil town of Lawrence.  They sacked the place, destroyed t

Lincoln badgered Douglas with the question of whether he favored the spread of slavery. He tried to force Douglas into the damaging admission that the Supreme Court had repudiated his territorial solution, popular sovereignty. In the debate at Freeport, Illinois, Douglas admitted that settlers could not now pass legislation barring slavery, but he argued that they could ban slavery just as effectively by not passing protective laws.

A relative and unknown and a decided underdog in the Illinois election, Lincoln challenged the incumbent Douglas to debate him face to face. Douglas agreed, and the two met in seven communities for what became a legendary series of debates. To the thousands who stood straining to see and hear, they must have seemed an odd pair. Douglas was five feet four inches tall, broad, and stocky; Lincoln was six feet four inches tall, angular and lean. Douglas was in perpetual motion, darting across the platform, shouting, and jabbing in the air. Lincoln stood still and spoke deliberately.