Continued rescues and escapes kept matters at a fever pitch for the rest of the decade.  In the fall of 1851 a Maryland slaveowner and his son accompanied federal marshals to Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Quaker village, where two of the man's slaves had taken refuge. The hunters ran into a fusillade of gunfire from a house where a dozen black men were protecting the fugitives. When the shooting stopped, the slave owner was dead and his son was seriously wounded. Three of the blacks fled to Canada. This time Fillmore sent the marines.

Lincoln's victory provided the shock that Southern fire-eaters had craved. The tension that had been building for years suddenly exploded like a string of firecrackers, as seven states seceded one after another. According to the theory of secession, when each state ratified the Constitution and joined the Union, it authorized the national government to act as its agent in the exercise of certain functions of sovereignty - but the states had never given away their fundamental underlying sovereignty itself.

Unable to protect their freedom through legal means, many blacks, with the support of white allies, resorted to flight and resistance. Thousands of northern blacks fled to Canada - 3,000 in the last three months of 1850s alone - sometimes under the very nose of slave-catchers. In 1852 slave-catchers arrested a fugitive who had taken the name Shadrach when he escaped from Virginia a year earlier.

The contest soon resolved itself into a two-party campaign in each section: Lincoln versus Douglas in the North and Breckinridge versus Bell in the South. The Republicans did not even put up a ticket in ten Southern states. And Douglas has no hope of carrying any of the same ten states. In the North, most old Whigs/American constituency had gone over to the Republicans. And while Breckinridge gained the support of the prominent Northern Democrats identified with the Buchanan administration, the Southern rights party could expect no Northern electoral votes.

Abolitionist both black and white, denounced the law as draconian, immoral and unconstitutional. They vowed to resist it. Opportunities soon came, as slaveowners sent  agents north to recapture fugitives, some who had escaped years earlier (the act set no statute of limitations).

The first oil well was drilled by E. L.

On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown took his war against slavery into the South. With only twenty-one men, including five African Americans, he crossed the Potomac River and invaded Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Sixty miles from Washington D.C., the small town had little to recommend it except its federal arsenal, which bristled with rifles. Brown’s band quickly seized the armory and rifle works, but the invaders were immediately surrounded, first by local militia and then by Colonel Robert E. Lee, who commanded the U.S. troops in the area.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave the federal government more power than any other law passed by Congress. The constitution required that a slave who escaped into a free state must be returned to his or her owner. But it did not specify how that should be done. Under the 1793 Law, Slaveowners could take recaptured property before any state or federal court to prove ownership. This procedure worked well enough so long as states were willing to cooperate. But as the antislavery movement gained momentum in the 1830s, some officials proved uncooperative.

The high point of the campaign came in a series of seven debates held from August to October 1858. The Lincoln-Douglas debates mixed political drama with the atmosphere of a festival. At the debate in Galesburg, for example, dozens of horse-drawn floats descended on the town from nearby farming communities...Douglas used the debates to portray Lincoln as a virtual abolitionist and advocate of racial equality. Both charges were calculated to doom Lincoln in the eyes of the intensely racist Illinois voters.

Conditions in Kansas Territory grew still worse. Meeting at the town of Lecompton, the proslavery convention in Kansas had drawn up a proposed state constitution authorizing slavery. The delegates represented only a minority of the people of the territory. But since they were Democrats, President Buchanan supported them. He urged Congress to accept this Lecompton Constitution and admit Kansas as a state.