“Stowe’sbook increased partisan feeling over slavery andintensified sectional differences. It did much to solidifymilitant antislavery attitude in the North, and thereforewas an important factor in the start of the American CivilWar”(Oates 31).In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act,which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, andstated that each territory could be admitted as a state“with of without slavery, as their constitution mayprescribe at the time of their admission”(Oates 42). Thisrepealed the old dividing line between free and slavestates as set by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. With thepassage of this act, a new Lincoln emerged into the worldof politics. Although he was as ambitious for politicaloffice as ever, he was now, for the first time in hiscareer, devoted to a cause. He became a forceful spokesmanfor the antislavery forces.In 1857, the Supreme Court of the United States addedto the mounting tension by its decision in the Dred ScottCase. Dred Scott was a slave owned by an army surgeon inMissouri. “In 1836, Scott had been taken by his owner toFort Snelling, in what is now Minnesota, then a territoryin which slavery was explicitly forbidden according to theMissouri Compromise”(Oates 50). In 1846, he brought a suitin the state court on the grounds that residence in a freeterritory liberated him from slavery. The Supreme Court ofMissouri, however, ruled that since he was brought backinto a state where slavery was legal, the status of slaverywas reattached to him and he had no standing before thecourt. The Scott case was then brought before the federalcourt which still held against Scott. The case was finallyappealed to the Supreme Court, where it was argued atlength in 1856 and decided in 1857. “The decision handeddown by a majority vote of the Court was that there was nopower in the existing form of government to make citizensslave or free, a...
