Words to Know:
All definitions from dictionary.com
Fugitive Slave Act: A law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, which provided southern slaveholders with legal weapons to capture slaves who had escaped to the free states. The law was highly unpopular in the North and helped to convert many previously indifferent northerners to antislavery.
Popular Sovereignty: a pre-Civil War doctrine asserting the right of the people living in a newly organized territory to decide by vote of their territorial legislature whether or not slavery would be permitted there
Secede: to withdraw formally from an alliance, federation, or association, as from a political union, a religious organization, etc.
Slavery: The state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household.