The first oil well was drilled by E. L. Drake, a retired railroad conductor. In 1859 he began drilling in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The whole venture seemed so impractical and foolish that onlookers called it "Drake's Folly." But when he had drilled won about 70 feet, Drake struck oil. His well began to yield 20 barrels of crude oil a day. News of Drake's success brought oil prospectors to the scene. By the early 1860s these wildcatters were drilling for "black gold" all over western Pennsylvania.

The modest labor-union activities of the 1850s revived after the depression, as workers in some industries went on strike to bring wages back to pre-panic levels.  In February 1860 the shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, began a strike that became the largest in U.S. history up to that time, eventually involving 20,000 workers in the New England shoe industry.  Nevertheless, in spite of the organization of several national unions of skilled workers during the 1850s, less than 1 percent of the labor force was unionized in 1860.

The Democrats, despite a fight over the nomination, has some success in papery over the division within their party. As their nominee for president they turned finally to Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. The platform pledged the Democrats to "abide by and adhere to the faithful execution of the acts known as the Compromise measures." The candidates and the platform generated a surprising reconciliation of the party's factions...The Whigs were less fortunate.

The publication in 1852 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, arouse wide northern sympathy for fugitive slaves…Stowe targeted slavery itself more than merely the slave-catchers who served the institution. Much of her novel's powers derives from its view that even good intentions cannot prevail against so evil an institution...Three hundred thousand copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold in 1852, and 1.2 million by the summer of 1853...The impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin cannot be precisely measured.

Continued rescues and escapes kept matters at a fever pitch for the rest of the decade. In the fall of 1851 a Maryland slave owner 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.

Clay's proposed compromise included several parts: (1) The admission of California as a free state. (2) The organization of land acquired from Mexico (except California) into territories on the basis of popular sovereignty." Thus the settlers might decide for themselves whether or not they wanted slavery in their territory. (3) A payment of $10 million to Texas by the United States, if Texas abandoned all claims to New Mexico east of the Rio Grande. (4) The abolition of the slave trade -- that is, of buying and selling of slaves, but not of slavery itself in the District of Columbia.

While Thoreau was at Walden Pond, the Mexican War erupted. Believing it an unjust war to advance the cause of slavery, he refused to pay his state poll tax as a gesture of opposition, for which he was put in jail (for only one night; an aunt paid the tax). The incident was so trivial as to be almost comic, but out of it grew the classic essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849), which was later to influence the passive-resistance movements of Mahatma Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the American South.

Nine days before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, however, an American carpenter discovered gold in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada range. The California gold rush began within a few months. A San Francisco newspaper complained that the "whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry to gold, GOLD, GOLD!