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The first power loom design is patented in Britain
In 1785, Edmund Cartwright of England invented the first power loom, and started a factory. His design needed improvements for sure, but this would be the birth of the textile industry. Power looms could weave cotton and spin thread many orders of magnitude faster than any person could. This would create an enormous need for the raw material to produce textiles: cotton. -
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Eli Whitney invents the cotton "gin."
Until the turn of the 19th century, the agricultural South relied on a small amount of cotton, and greater amounts of indigo, rice, and tobacco to make a living. The process of cultivating cotton was just too laborious to be very profitable. It had to be seeded by hand, which was very slow work. Eli Whitney's cotton engine or "gin" sped up the process so much that one slave turning the cotton gin could seed cotton faster than an entire room full of slaves seeding by hand. -
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Francis Lowell builds the first American power loom.
Francis Lowell spent time in London spying on Cartwright's textile mill, and memorized components of it and wrote them down. Upon returning to America, he used what he had learned and made necessary improvements on Cartwright's design, and set up the first American textile mill in Lowell Massachusetts. Other manufactorers were quick to use the new technology of the steam engine to build factories making all kinds of goods. Quickly, the North became the Industrial center of the U.S. -
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Missouri Compromise of 1820
Slave owners placed evermore value in the idea that prosperity depended on the uninfringed on right to own slaves. The balance of power between slave states and free states was crucial. When part of Massachusetts formed the free state of Maine, free states outnumbered slave states. The Missouri Compromise placed Missouri as a slave state to balance power as long as all states north of 36 degrees, 30' latitude remained free. -
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The Tariff Act of 1828
The booming textile industry in the North needed protection from stiff competition overseas, so Congress placed a tariff on all goods to make Northern textiles more competitive. However, this effectively raised prices on all consumer goods that the South needed but could not produce due to almost no industrial development. As a result, Southerners called this Act the Tariff of Abominations. -
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The Liberator newspaper is published
In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publication of an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, an event that marks the beginning of the radical abolitionist movement. The uncompromising Garrison advocated immediate abolition of slavery in every state and territory without compensating the slaveowners.
1. John Newman United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Exam -
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Major Virginia slave revolt
In 1831, a Virginia slave named Nat Turner led a revolt in which 55 whites were killed. In retaliation, whites killed hundreds of blacks in brutal fashion and managed to put down the revolt. -
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Democrats nominate Senator Cass
Cass proposes a compromise of "popular sovereignty," a position supporting the vote of the people of a new state to decide whether it shall be a slave state or a free state. -
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Compromise of 1850
The gold rush of 1849 and the influx of thousands of settlers into California created the need for law and order in the West. IN 1849, Californians drafted a Constitution for their new state-a constitution that banned slavery. Even though President Taylor was a southern slaveholder himself, he supported the immediate admission of both California and New Mexico as free states. Taylor's plan sparked talk of secession among Southern radicals, marking a new wave of Southern rage. -
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Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom's Cabin
The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 by the northern writer Harriet Beecher Stowe moved a generation of northerners as well as many Europeans to regard all slave owners as monstrously cruel and inhuman. Later, when President Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe, he is reported to have said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." -
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The Kansas-Nebraska Act
With Democrats in control of all three branches of government, a new law was passed that was to have disastrous consequences. Senator Stephen A Douglas of Illinois passed a bill that proposed that the Nebraska Territory be divided into the Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory, and the settlers there be free to decide the slavery issue. These settlers resorted to violence to advance their views, and the conflict became known as Bleeding Kansas. -
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Dred Scott v. Sandford
Dred Scott had been held as a slave in Missouri and then taken to the free territory of Wisconsin where he lived for two years before returning to Missouri. Arguing that his period of residence on free soil made him free, he fought all the way to the Supreme Court. The court case infuriated northerners because it effectively declared all the West open to slavery and dehumanized people of African descent. Many Northern Democrats' fury was such that they supported the new Republican Party. -
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Election of 1860
The election of Republican President Abraham Lincoln was the final trigger the southern secessionists needed to call for immediate disunion. In December 1860 a special convention in South Carolina voted unanimously to secede. Lincoln followed up on his warning that "no state had the right to break up the Union," and the bloodiest war for Americans in all American History begun.