The Missouri Compromise stated that Missouri would be admitted as a slave state and Maine would be admitted as free in order to keep a balance between states. It also stated that new states admitted out of the Louisiana Purchase would be free if they were north of the Southern border of Missouri.

Interestingly, the Mugwumps were a faction of the Republican Party that voted Democrat (just for Cleveland). The reason being that the Mugwumps were firm believers in civil-service reform, and just didn’t quite think that Blane, the Half-Breed candidate, was up to the challenge.

The Whig Party was formed in 1833, in opposition the dominant Democratic Party and President Andrew Jackson. The Party was formed primarily on the ideology that Congress should always possess greater authority over the direction of the nation than the President. The first election contested by the Whigs was the election of 1936, but the party was insufficiently organized to run one candidate across the whole nation, so they opted for a series of regional challengers in the hope that they could deny a clear majority to Martin Van Buren, and therefore bring the election to the Senate. They narrowly missed out on this goal. In the election of 1840, however, the Whigs ran their first unified candidate, William Henry Harrison, who promptly died after thirty-one days in office.

The eighth President of the United States, Martin van Buren, was instrumental in founding the Democratic Party, the oldest current party in the country.

In 1803, Marbury v. Madison established the principle of judicial review, giving the Supreme Court the power to determine the constitutionality of an act.

The Union had to invade and conquer wide swaths of Southern territory in order to defeat the rebellion. It was hoped by Confederate officials that a long and bloody conflict would lead to war weariness in the North and force the United States to recognize Southern independence.

President Lincoln actually thought that the Wade-Davis Bill was far too draconian (meaning, went too far in its punishment) and thus pocket-vetoed the bill. Technically speaking, a pocket-veto is less confrontational than an actual veto (the President simply refuses to act—sign or veto—on a bill for ten days after Congress has adjourned), but Lincoln’s pocket veto infuriated the Radical Republicans in Congress, who viewed the bill as just desserts for the rebellious southerners.

Henry Clay’s American System was a wide ranging economic plan developed and advocated by Clay throughout the 1820s while he was a member of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The key features were attempts to actively promote economic activities through raising revenues with tariffs and land prices, and economic improvements like the Bank of the United States and building canals and railroads.

The battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) was the bloodiest single-day battle of the Civil War, with over twenty thousand casualties. The battle was fought between the Confederate army of Northern Virginia against the Union forces, led by George McClellan. The battle of Antietam ended Lee’s invasion of the North and forced the Confederate army to withdraw to Virginia. Following the culmination of the battle President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle, but it lasted longer than one day.

The Free Soil Party was a short lived, yet influential, third party that had some success between 1848 and 1852. Emerging after the territorial gains of the Mexican-American War, the Free Soil Party advocated for the halt to the spread of slavery throughout the new territories in the West. While largely made up of abolitionists, the Free Soil Party never argued for total abolition of slavery and was largely subsumed into the brand new Republican Party during the 1856 election.