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Three-Fifths Compromise Enacted
A Congressional agreement was enacted in which, for the purposes of representation and taxation, three of every five slaves in a slave state would be counted. -
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Key Events Affecting the American Civil War and Reconstruction
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Eli Whitney Patents the Cotton Gin
The cotton gin allowed for fifty more times cotton to be processed in a day than in the past, increasing the demand for cotton and therefore for slave labor to grow and pick the cotton from the ground. -
Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves
Beginning January 1st, 1808, federal laws stated that no new slaves could be imported to the United States. All new slaves would have to be born from enslaved parents in America after this date. -
Fugitive Slave Act
As part of the Compromise of 1850, this law made federal officials pay a fine if they did not arrest runaway slaves. The abolitionist cause intensified in reaction to this law. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin is Published
This anti-slavery novel sold 300,000 in the United States in its first year of publication, greatly spreading the abolitionist movement. Though not entirely based on observation (the author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had never lived in the South), the portrayal of slavery in the novel greatly influenced public opinion toward slavery. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas-Nebraska Act replaced the earlier Missouri Compromise of drawing lines for free and slave territories and instead left the status of a state up to popular sovereignty, further dividing the states. -
Dred Scott Decision
The court case Dred Scott v. Sandford established that Africans held as slaves and their descendants could never be United States citizens and therefore were not protected by the Constitution. -
Italian Unification under King Victor Emmanuel II
Under the military campaigns of Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy was eventually united under the proclaimed crown of King Victor Emmanuel II. Garibaldi's military experience and patriotic sense of duty later led to him being offered a key officer position by the Union Army, but he refused unless Lincoln would publicly call the war a struggle to end slavery. This transition into a war with abolitionist versus pro-slavery elements was used in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. -
Cotton Famine
Beginning in 1861, England's textile plants suffered from a shortage of cotton brought on mainly by the Union blockade of Confederate ports. An initial relief fund was paid out on May 16th, 1862 to affected areas, but by 1864 the industry had recovered in part by new sources of cotton and new shipping routes. England was not as dependant as expected on Southern U.S. cotton and did not provide assistance to the Confederacy in the American Civil War. -
Maximilian Formally Crowned Emperor of Mexico
Austrian archduke Maximilian is placed on the throne of Mexico, supported by the French occupying forces of Napoleon III. Intending to become a power on the North American continent, the newly created Second Mexican Empire favored a Confederate victory and was protested by the Union during the American Civil War. The 50,000 American troops sent to the U.S.-Mexico border in 1865 did not engage in battle, but such a battle would serve to reunite the Union and Confederate soldiers after the war.
