ries would have slavery a lot, and both sides wanted this domination in political power. Crisis struck in 1820, when the North/South balance in the Senate was threatened by the application of Missouri to join the Union as a slave state. Southerners, aware of their numerical inferiority in the House of Representatives, were keen to maintain their political sway in the Senate. The North feared that if Southerners were to take control of the Senate, political deadlock would ensue. A compromise was found in 1820 when Maine applied to join as a free state, maintaining the balance. It was agreed that slavery would not be allowed North of the 36’ 30’ parallel, which was the line of longitude known as the Mason-Dixon Line, except in Missouri, and set the precedent of free and slave state admission in pairs. The Kansas-Nebraska act in 1854 repealed this compromise, and although this act appeared to be liked, it provoked a mini civil war in Kansas, with abolitionists and slaveholders fighting for control of the state and thus the decision whether to permit slavery. At Pottawatomie in 1856, Missouri pro-slavery campaigners raided a free soil camp, burning property and attacking its inhabitants. Disagreement over slavery now turned into violent conflict, with atrocities committed by both sides. Through a Southern rigging of the ballot, a state constitution passed permitting slavery, despite free-soilers outnumbering proslavery citizens by three to one. The events of the late 1850s gave the territory the disliked title of ‘Bleeding Kansas’.The Southern, and passionately pro-slavery, Chief Justice Taney did not help the volatile political climate of this period. In the 1857 Dred Scott case, he ruled that Negroes were not citizens and therefore had no right to bring a case to court. He also ruled that the Missouri Compromise had denied slaveholders their property, thus compromising the Fifth Amendment. His thought on t...
