Between the time period of 1840 and 1860, slavery played an influential and pivotal role in the development of a new southern lifestyle. In the struggle for dominance in America, slavery was the South’s stronghold and the underlying cause in much of their motives for many of the economic instigations along with the affirmative political actions. By dominating the everyday southerner’s life, slavery also dominated the economic and political aspects of life during the height of the slavery period. By the 1840’s the Southern economy had become almost entirely slave and and agriculturally dependent. Without the dependence of slaves in the south, a person was to remain landless, poverty stricken or struggling to sustain life through the means …show more content…

This act was successful in repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and called for popular sovereignty in Kansas and Nebraska which under the Missouri Compromise had been free, as dictated by federal law. The Missouri Compromise was originally an act to settle disputes about free states and slave states entering the Union in an attempt to keep the balance of free states and states that permitted slavery equal. To repeal this was to almost beg for revolution; hence the term “Bleeding Kansas” which included the John Brown riots and caused political and social unrest in these areas affected by the law. The Compromise of 1850 was another feeble solution to the predominate problem of run-away slaves and the recurring issue of slavery in new territories. This Compromise created stronger fugitive slave laws which satisfied Southern slave catchers and enraged Northern abolitionists. Millard Fillmore, President at the time, was inept in favoring any side and felt that this compromise would be the driving force that would keep the already fragile union together. The compromise also made California a free state, and the area won in the Mexican Cession would be subject to popular sovereignty, and lastly, dictated that there would be no slave trade in Washington D.C., but it would remain a slave state to keep the proper balance. The weak and extremely controversial compromises would would only further split the nation on the topic of slavery and create a greater schism within the