In 1803, The U.S. doubled in size practically overnight when it purchased about 828,000 square miles of territory from France. President Thomas Jefferson had sent some envoys (including future pres...

From the nation's founding, there'd been a policy of maintaining a delicate balance of slaveholding vs. free states so that sectional conflict might be avoided and no state would feel they'd have t...

Henry Clay and his Compromise of 1850 had calmed things down for the time being between North and South. But the sectional conflict never really went away, and it erupted again when the Nebraska Te...

In 1833, Army surgeon John Emerson purchased a slave, Dred Scott, and when Emerson moved to the Wisconsin Territory, he took Scott with him. Because of the Missouri Compromise, Wisconsin was a free...