1852
- Democrat Franklin Pierce, a friend of Hawthorne's, defeats General Winfield Scott for the presidency and affirms his support for the Compromise of 1850.
- "Know-Nothing" Party opposes Catholics and immigrants.
1853
- 30 December. Gadsden Purchase gives the U.S. a strip of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona. (Map)
- Abba Alcott and 73 other women petition the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention to urge suffrage for women.
- Emigrant Aid Society encourages anti-slavery settlers to move to Kansas
- 24 May. Wendell Phillips and others lead anti-slavery mob to attack a Federal court house in Boston that holds Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave.
- 30 May. The Kansas-Nebraska Act passes, allowing "popular sovereignty"; the net effect was to negate the Missouri Compromise (1820). (Read the text of this document.)
- Abraham Lincoln gives a speech condemning the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
- 18 October. Minister to Great Britain James Buchanan, Minister to France John Y. Mason, and Minister to Spain Pierre Soulé meet in Ostand, Belgium and Aix-le-Chapelle to draw up the Ostend Manifesto, an attempt to purchase Cuba from Spain that emphasizes Cuba's strategic importance and threatens to take it by force should negotiations fail. The public reaction to this move, which would presumably have added Cuba as a slave state, forces its chief supporter, Secretary of State William Marcy, to repudiate the manifesto.
1855
- March. After pro-slavery Missourians cross the Kansas border to elect a territorial legislature, Free State Kansans vote to outlaw slavery and set up their own capital at Topeka.
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