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Henry Highland Garnet's "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America"
Garnet's appeal helped slaves realize their plights, and give them the determination, freedom, and courage to escape the depths to which they had been cast into. -
WIlliam Lloyd Garrison Published The Liberator
The Liberator was an American abolitionist newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp. Religious rather than political, it appealed to the moral conscience of its readers, urging them to demand immediate freeing of the slaves. It also promoted women’s rights. -
Nat Turner Slave Revolt
Rebel slaves killed from 55 to 65 people, at least 51 being white. The rebellion was put down within a few days, but Turner survived in hiding for more than two months afterwards. -
American Anti-Slavery Society Begins
Founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan, promoted the immediate cause for abolition during the pre-civil war era. -
Sarah Grimke Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
Sarah Grimké responded to Catharine Beecher’s defense of the subordinate role of women. She was particularly concerned to attack two of Beecher’s arguments. First was the notion that women were subordinate to men by God’s decree. She argued instead that God had made the sexes equal, but that men had created women’s inferior condition by denying them opportunity and forcing them to do their bidding. -
Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls
Seneca Falls was the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, along with Lucretia Mott, conceived and directed the convention. At the 1848 convention Stanton read the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a statement of grievances and demands patterned closely after the Declaration of Independence. -
Harriett Tubman Escapes from Slavery
Harriet Tubman escaped from Maryland to lead an Abolitionist war before the civil war. She helped slaves escape from the south by leading them through safehouses to the north known as the underground railroad collectively. -
Compromise of 1850
Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions on January 29, 1850, in an attempt to seek a compromise and avert a crisis between North and South. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. -
Fugitive Slave Act
Fugitive Slave Acts, in U.S. history, statutes passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850 (and repealed in 1864) that provided for the seizure and return of runaway slaves who escaped from one state into another or into a federal territory. This one was part of the Compromise of 1850. -
Sojourner Truth Delivered her "Ain't I a Woman" Speech
I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? -
Harriet Beecher Stowe Published Uncle Tom's Cabin
An abolitionist novel, it achieved wide popularity, particularly among white readers in the North, by vividly dramatizing the experience of slavery. -
Bleeding Kansas
Sponsors of the Kansas–Nebraska Act expected its provisions for territorial self-government to arrest the “torrent of fanaticism” that had been dividing the nation regarding the slavery issue. Instead, free-soil forces from the North formed armed emigrant associations to populate Kansas, while proslavery advocates poured over the border from Missouri. Periodic bloodshed along the border followed as the two factions fought battles, captured towns, and set prisoners free. -
Republican Party Founded
By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting in Wisconsin is generally remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´. -
Lecompton Constitution
Southern pro-slavery Kansas advocated drafted this proposal. It contained clauses protecting slaveholding and a bill of rights excluding free blacks, and it added to the frictions leading up to the U.S. Civil War. -
Panic of 1857
A notable sudden collapse in the economy caused by over speculation in railroads and lands, false banking practices, and a break in the flow of European capital to American investments as a result of the Crimean War. Since it did not effect the South as bad as the North, they gained a sense of superiority. -
Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott decision legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (7–2) that a slave who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820) was unconstitutional. The decision added fuel to the sectional controversy and pushed the country closer to civil war. -
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
When Lincoln received the Republican nomination to run against Douglas, he said in his acceptance speech that “A house divided against itself cannot stand” and that “this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Douglas thereupon attacked Lincoln as a radical, threatening the continued stability of the Union. Lincoln then challenged Douglas to a series of debates, and the two eventually agreed to hold joint encounters in seven Illinois congressional districts. -
John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was an effort by abolitionist John Brown to initiate an armed slave revolt in 1859 by taking over a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown's party of 22 was defeated by a company of U.S. Marines, led by First Lieutenant Israel Greene. -
Democratic Party Splits into Northern and Southern Halves
Because the Democratic vote was spread so thin, Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated Douglas, Breckenridge, and Bell in the 1860 presidential election. The Democrats' split had defeated their own party. This idea of a "Slave Power Conspiracy," which Lincoln boldly proclaimed in his "House Divided" speech to the Illinois Republican convention in June 1858, identified the party with democratic ideals and provided a shorthand expression of northern resentment against the South's political clout. -
Abraham Lincoln Elected President
United States presidential election of 1860, American presidential election held on Nov. 6, 1860, in which Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. The electoral split between Northern and Southern Democrats was emblematic of the severe sectional split, particularly over slavery. -
South Carolina Secedes from the Union
South Carolina withdrew from the United States on December 20, 1860. The state seceded because a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, had been elected president. The Republicans were a new party, and Lincoln was the first to be elected president. They wanted to stop slavery from spreading into the western territories. -
Confederate States of America Founded
Confederate States of America, also called Confederacy, in the American Civil War, the government of 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860–61, carrying on all the affairs of a separate government and conducting a major war until defeated in the spring of 1865. Threatened by the recent election, the seven states of the Deep South (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas) seceded from the Union. -
Firing on Fort Sumter
The Battle of Fort Sumter was the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina by the Confederate States Army, and the return gunfire and subsequent surrender by the United States Army, that started the American Civil War. It was done in response to Abraham Lincoln's declaration to resupply the fort. -
Battle of Antietam
Beginning early on the morning of this day in 1862, Confederate and Union troops in the Civil War clash near Maryland's Antietam Creek in the bloodiest single day in American military history. The Battle of Antietam marked the culmination of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the Northern states. -
Emancipation Proclamation
The proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln, declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states of the Confederacy "are, and henceforward shall be free." -
Battle of Gettysburg
On July 1st Robert E. Lee Marched his forces into Pennsylvania, where he was met by fire from Union soldiers. One assault, known as “Pickett’s Charge,” managed to pierce the Union lines but eventually failed, at the cost of thousands of rebel casualties, and Lee was forced to withdraw his battered army toward Virginia on July 4th. This was considered a turning point in the war because the Confederates never recovered. -
Gettysburg Address
Lincoln advocates the words of the Declaration of Independence; and, Lincoln accentuated the Civil War as not just a fight to preserve the Union, but to bring equality to “all” of its citizens: “…conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” -
Abraham Lincoln Reelected
President Lincoln's Reelection. Despite progress in the war, Lincoln and most political pundits were convinced that he would lose his bid for reelection in 1864. The country was war weary and the Democratic Party's nominee, George McClellan, was likely to negotiate a peace treaty with the Confederacy if elected. -
General U.S. Grant Assumed Control of the Union Forces
An Ohio native, Grant graduated from West Point and fought in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). During the Civil War, Grant, an aggressive and determined leader, was given command of all the U.S. armies. After the war he became a national hero, and the Republicans nominated him for president in 1868. -
Sherman's March to the Sea
Union General William T. Sherman led some 60,000 soldiers on a 285-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of Sherman's March to the Sea was to frighten Georgia's civilian population into abandoning the Confederate cause. -
Andrew Johnson Became President
Johnson assumed the presidency as he was vice president of the United States at the time of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
His lenient Reconstruction policies toward the South embittered the Radical Republicans in Congress and led to his political downfall and to his impeachment, though he was acquitted. -
Johnson Announced Plans for Presidential Reconstruction
In 1865 President Andrew Johnson implemented a plan of Reconstruction that gave the white South a free hand in regulating the transition from slavery to freedom and offered no role to blacks in the politics of the South. -
Arrival of Scalawags and Carpetbaggers in South
The term “carpetbaggers” refers to Northerners who moved to the South after the Civil War, during Reconstruction. Many carpetbaggers were said to have moved South for their own financial and political gains. Scalawags were white Southerners who cooperated politically with black freedmen and Northern newcomers. -
Freedman's Bureau
The Freedmen's Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was established in 1865 by Congress to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. -
Congress Passed the 13th Amendment
Lincoln recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation would have to be followed by a constitutional amendment in order to guarantee the abolishment of slavery. The 13th amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War before the Southern states had been restored to the Union and should have easily passed the Congress.
The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. -
Lee Surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House
On April 9, 1865, near the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. ... But the resulting Battle of Appomattox Court House, which lasted only a few hours, effectively brought the four-year Civil War to an end. -
Lincoln Assassination
Shot in the head by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln died the next morning, which occurred only days after the surrender at Appomattox Court House of Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, which had signaled the effective end of the American Civil War. Lincoln’s death plunged much of the country into despair, and the search for Booth and his accomplices was the largest manhunt in American history to that date. -
Ku Klux Klan formed
Under a platform of philosophized white racial superiority, the group employed violence as a means of pushing back Reconstruction and its enfranchisement of African Americans. Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the KKK’s first grand wizard; in 1869, he unsuccessfully tried to disband it after he grew critical of the Klan’s excessive violence. -
Civil Rights Act Passed over Johnson's Veto
Johnson vetoed each of the [amendments], but the new congress had the votes to override his vetoes. ... Eventually, Johnson fired Stanton in open defiance of Congress, who then impeached the President for having broken the law. -
First Congressional Reconstruction Act Passed
Reconstruction Acts, U.S. legislation enacted in 1867–68 that outlined the conditions under which the Southern states would be readmitted to the Union following the American Civil War (1861–65). The bills were largely written by the Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) provided former slaves with national citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) granted black men the right to vote. -
Andrew Johnson Impeached
On March 5, the trial began in the Senate, where Republicans held more seats than the two-thirds majority required to remove Johnson from office. When the trial concluded on May 16, however, the president had won acquittal, not because a majority of senators supported his policies but because a sufficient minority wished to protect the office of president and preserve the constitutional balance of powers. -
14th Amendment Ratified
The amendment grants citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" which included former slaves who had just been freed after the Civil War. -
U.S. Grant Elected President
In the first election of the Reconstruction Era, Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant defeated Democrat Horatio Seymour. He worked to implement Congressional Reconstruction and to remove the vestiges of slavery. -
Period of Redemption After the Civil War
White Democratic Southerners saw themselves as redeeming the South by regaining power. They appealed to scalawags (white Southerners who supported the Republican Party after the Civil War and during the Reconstruction Era. In the context of southern politics, the term Redemption refers to the overthrow or defeat of Radical Republicans (white and black) by white Democrats, marking the end of the Reconstruction era in the South. -
15th Amendment Ratified
Fifteenth Amendment, amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States that guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” -
Creation of Radical Republicans
The Radical Republicans believed blacks were entitled to the same political rights and opportunities as whites. They also believed that the Confederate leaders should be punished for their roles in the Civil War. Leaders like Pennsylvania REPRESENTATIVE THADDEUS STEVENS and Massachusetts SENATOR CHARLES SUMNER vigorously opposed Andrew Johnson's lenient policies. -
Slaughterhouse Cases
The Court ruled against the other slaughterhouse cases. Associate Justice Samuel F. Miller, for the majority, declared that the Fourteenth Amendment had “one pervading purpose”: protection of the newly emancipated blacks. The amendment did not, however, shift control over all civil rights from the states to the federal government. States still retained legal jurisdiction over their citizens, and federal protection of civil rights did not extend to the property rights of businessmen. -
U.S. vs Cruikshank
The Cruikshank case arose from the 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which a group of armed whites killed more than a hundred African American men as a result of a political dispute. The whites appealed on the grounds that their indictments were insufficient. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court sided with the defendants, holding that the rights they were alleged to have violated were not enforceable in this case. -
Compromise of 1877
The Compromise of 1877 was an informal, unwritten deal, that settled the intensely disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election. It resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the South, and formally ended the Reconstruction Era.
