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This was a term describing activists and politicians opposed to slavery and were largely based in the northern United States. While they agreed slavery should be completely outlawed everywhere in the United States, it is important to note that abolitionists had a range of views on African Americans themselves. Some believed in racial equality and wanted to extend full civil rights to African Americans, while others held racist views and wanted to see African Americans relocated somewhere outside the United States, like the African country of Liberia.

The term “Black Codes” covers a wide variety of local and state laws that limited the civil rights of African Americans, imposed the segregation of African Americans, and often punished them with involuntary labor, exploiting a loophole in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were passed in order to combat laws such as the Black Codes.

This term covers a set of laws passed by Congress that tried to maintain a workable balance between free states and “slave states” in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. These included making California a free state, toughening laws against runaway enslaved people, and allowing Texas and New Mexico to choose between being “slave states” or free states.