>>18097680
>>18097687
>>18097698
The whole 1850 crisis happened because southern politicians didn’t want to accept that their fellow southerners living in the Mexican Cession didn’t want slavery, and that both the desert and the Rocky Mountains are horrible places to build cotton plantations. The South pushed for the annexation of Texas and war with Mexico because they assumed the new territory would become slave states, then threw a bitchfit when faced with reality. Northern radicalization was a reaction to southern provocation.
TL;DR: The South wanted to spread slavery based on faulty political assumptions and their own unsustainable economy, the North tried to placate them, and Lincoln might have lost if the anti-Republican vote wasn’t split between three divisive candidates.
>>18097695
He was one of the co-founders of the Knights of the Golden Circle, which would become the Ku Klux Klan.