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Cotton Gin
Eli Whitney was the first to develop a cotton gin. Cotton gins separates seeds from short-staple cotton. It increased the amount of cotton a single person could process in one day. -
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase doubled the United States. Napoleon Sold the Louisiana territory to Jefferson for 15 million dollars. -
American System
Henry Clay was the creator of the American System. This system was created to boost the American economy. This system was said to balance the nation's agriculture, commerce, and industry. -
Missouri Compromise
"Compromise of 1820" over the issue of slavery in Missouri. It was decided Missouri entered as a slave state and Maine entered as a free state and all states North of the 36th parallel were free states and all South were slave states. -
Monroe Dcotrine
The Monroe Doctrine was a US foreign policy regarding Latin American countries in the early 19th century. It stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention. -
Nullification Crisis
The Nullification Crisis arose in the early 1830s when leaders of South Carolina advanced the idea that a state did not have to follow a federal law and could, in effect, "nullify" the law. -
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
In 1831 a slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southhampton County, Virginia. A religious leader and self-styled Baptist minister, Turner and a group of followers killed some sixty white men, women, and children on the night of August 21. Turner and 16 of his conspirators were captured and executed, but the incident continued to haunt Southern whites. Blacks were randomly killed all over Southhampton County; many were beheaded and their heads left along the roads to warn others. In the wake -
Texas Revolution
The Texas Revolution was a revolutionary movement, 1832–36, in which U.S. settlers asserted their independence from Mexico and established the republic of Texas. -
Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (, which brought an official end to the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) was signed on February 2, 1848, at Guadalupe Hidalgo, a city north of the capital where the Mexican government had fled with the advance of U.S. forces. -
Compromise of 1850
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe's best known novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), changed forever how Americans viewed slavery, the system that treated people as property. It demanded that the United States deliver on the promise of freedom and equality, galvanized the abolition movement and contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. The book calls on us to confront the legacy of race relations in the U.S. as the title itself became a racial slur. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
1854 - Created Nebraska and Kansas as states and gave the people in those territories the right to chose to be a free or slave state through popular sovereignty. -
Beating of Charles Sumnr
Preston Brooks beats Charles Sumner with a cane. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was an avowed Abolitionist and leader of the Republican Party. After the sack of Lawrence, on May 21, 1856, he gave a bitter speech in the Senate called "The Crime Against Kansas." -
Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott an American slave who sued his master for keeping him enslaved in a territory where slavery was banned under the missouri Compromise -
Harper’s Ferry
On October 16, 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown led a group of 21 men in a raid on the arsenal. Five of the men were African American: three free African Americans, one a freed slave and one a fugitive slave. During this time assisting fugitive slaves was illegal under the Fugitive Slave Act. Brown attacked and captured several buildings. -
Election of 1860
The election of 1860 was rocky right from the very beginning as four major candidates accepted nominations for the presidency. The Democratic Party had great difficulty selecting a candidate because party members could not agree on the major issue of the day: the expansion of slavery in the Western territories. -
South Carolina Secedes
On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first Southern state to declare its secession and later formed the Confederacy.
