During the antebellum period, the issue of slavery influenced many religious and political debates. This was seen in the Lincoln Douglass debates, legislation, and the evolution of political parties. The political debates that fueled the slavery controversy stemmed from legislation. The first legislation passed was the Three-Fifths Compromise. Of course, Southern states wanted slaves to be counted as a whole person because the slave population in the South was larger. Northern states objected. The Three-Fifths Compromise stipulated that three out of five slaves would be counted in the population count to determine the amount of representation in Congress. Other constitutional laws included the section stating that the slave trade would end in 1808 and the 16th Amendment allowing an income tax levy. This especially affected free blacks because a poll tax was then allowed to be imposed on them. An important piece of legislation that influenced the slave debate was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The Fugitive Slave Act was "An act respecting fugitives from justice and persons fleeing from the service of their masters." If a slave ran away, he was to be arrested and punished in a manner appropriate to the location to which the slave fled. This law was later tightened in 1850. Originally the two parties established were the Whigs and the Democrats. These parties evolved and changed as legislation came into the Union and it had to be decided which states were to be slave states and which were to be free. This issue was a major divide during the antebellum period. The first piece of legislation to comment on this issue was passed by the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Henry Clay came up with... middle of paper... dependence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." His solution was the containment of slavery in the South. The North was accustomed to change and could more easily rid itself of slavery, but the South could not. Lincoln won the election of 1860. The slavery issue evolved from an issue of containment to one issue of containment. of equality this time shaped antebellum politics and led America into a different era. Works Cited PBS, Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia. /part2/2h62.html Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 294.IBID, 298IBID, 297IBID, 298IBID, 300IBID, 304IBID, 305IBID, 309John Brown, "Address to the Court at His trial", "John Brown's speech at the Court at his trial, 1859Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglass, argue about slavery,1860