This PowerPoint presentation is designed to cover a lecture on the events leading to the American Civil War between the Compromise of 1850 and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. It includes the controversies surrounding the strenghtened Fugitive Slave Law, the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, the Brooks-Sumner incident, Nativism, the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid, and the election of Abraham Lincoln.