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The American Colonization Soceity forms
The American Colonization Soceity was originally formed to mutualize two groups with different points of view. One group consisted of people who wanted to free African slaves and all of their descendents. The other group included the slave owners who feared free people of color and wanted to expel them from America. After this society was formed, the colony expanded and increased economic stability. -
Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise was an agreement that prohibited all of the existing Louisiana territory from slavery except the boundaries of Missouri. The Senate debated and eventually declared Missouri into the union as a slave-state. -
The American Antislavery Society Forms
The American Antislavery Soceity was founded by three abolitionists Theodore Weld, Arthur Tappan, and Lewis Tappan. They provided both the Southerners and the Northerners of how inhumane the existing slavery was. The organization sent out lectures describing how brutal slavery was and hoped to convince people to oppose it. -
The Liberty Party forms
The Liberty party was the first antislavery party formed in New York, and it was run by a former slave owner. Northern concern began to increase, which led to the Free Soil Party. -
The Mexican-American War starts
The Mexican-American War was a major conflict driven by the belief that America had an implied right to expand the country's borders from "sea to shining sea". This led to suffering of many Mexicans, Native Americans and United States citizens. -
Wilmot Proviso
In 1846, an amendment to a bill provided about $2 million to enable the President, who was Polk at the time, to negotiate the concept of banning slavery in any of the territory aquired in the Mexican-American war. -
The Free Soil Party forms
The Free Soil Party's main purpose was to oppose the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Former anti-slavery members of the Whig and Democratic party argued that free men on free soil presented slavery as a system that benefits morals and economics. -
California Gold Rush
During January of 1848, James Marshall had a crew of workmen that were building a mill for John Sutter. Marshall came across a few small nuggets of gold, making California the dependent state for gold-mining. This began one of the largest human migrations in history as a half-million people from around the world traveled to California in search of instant wealth. -
The Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 consitsted of five laws that were passed involving the issues of slavery. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin is published
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a novel concerning anti-slavery which was published in 1852. The novel was so popular that within three months it sold 300,000 copies. She wrote the book while living in Cincinnati, when she encountered fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad. Later, she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in reaction to recently tightened fugitive slave laws. Reviews say that the book had a major influence and impace on the way the Americans viewed slavery. -
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas–Nebraska Act established the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which opened new lands for settlement. The act effected the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing settlers within those territories to determine whether they would allow slavery. -
The Sumner-Brooks Affair
On May 22, Senator Charles Sumner made a speech concerning the abolition of slavery in the United States. After being exposed to the lecture, Brooks took some parts of the speech personally and beat Sumner over the head with his cane so hard that it shattered. The violence was so harsh that Sumner didn't go out in public until November 5th, 1856. He didn't return to the Senate for three years, until he was repeatedly re-elected until he took the position again. -
The Dred Scott decision
In March of 1857, the Supreme Court, led by Roger Taney, officially declared that all blacks, slaves as well as free, could never become citizens of the United States. He said that blacks "had no rights which the whites were bound to respect." It is called the Dred Scott case because Dred Scott was a slave who had lived in the free territories of Illinois and Wisconsin before returning back to the slave state of Missouri. He communicated with the Supreme Court and hoped to regain his freedom. -
The Lincoln-Douglass debates
The Lincoln-Douglass debates were a series of formal political debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, over one of Illinois' two United States Senate positions. Lincoln and Douglas agreed to debate in seven of the nine Illinois Congressional Districts. Lincoln lost the election, but the debates launched him into a national favor which eventually led to his election as President. -
The Election of 1860
The election was held for the new official President of the United States. After the election was completed, the Civil War would immediately begin. Abraham Lincoln won the position in office, and historians say that even though Lincoln lost the debates against Douglass, the debates prepared him to win over the presidency.
