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The Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 & 1850
The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway slaves within the territory of the United States. -
Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso was designed to eliminate slavery within the land acquired as a result of the Mexican War (1846-48). -
Gold Discovery at Sutter's Mill, California
James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Jersey, found flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Coloma, California. -
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ended the Mexican-American War in favor of the United States. -
The Seneca Falls Convention
At the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y., a woman’s rights convention–the first ever held in the United States–convenes with almost 200 women in attendance. -
The Free-Soil Party
In the Election of 1848, Van Buren was passed over again by the Democrats, so he and antislavery forces from the Democratic (such as the Barnburners), Whig and Liberty parties formed the Free-Soil Party. -
The Compromise of 1850
It consisted of laws admitting California as a free state, creating Utah and New Mexico territories with the question of slavery in each to be determined by popular sovereignty, settling a Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute in the former’s favor, ending the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and making it easier for southerners to recover fugitive slaves. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin is Published
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is published. The novel sold 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” -
Kansas-Nebraska Act Passed
The Kansas-Nebrask Act was an 1854 bill that mandated “popular sovereignty”–allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders. -
Republican Party Organized
With the successful introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories by popular sovereignty, the Whigs disintegrated. The anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party. -
Violence Takes Center Stage in "Bleeding Kansas"
In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraksa Act overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory and instead, using the principle of popular sovereignty, decreed that the residents would determine whether the area became a free state or a slave state. Proslavery and free-state settlers flooded into Kansas to try to influence the decision. Violence soon erupted as both factions fought for control. -
Charles Sumner Attacked in the Senate
In his Crime against Kansas speech, he lambasted southern efforts to extend slavery into Kansas and attacked his colleague, Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina. Shortly after that speech, Butler’s cousin, Congressman Preston Brooks, assaulted Sumner on the Senate floor. He spent three and a half years recovering from the beating. -
Supreme Court Announces the Dred Scott v. Sandford Decision
The United States Supreme Court issues a decision in the Dred Scott case, affirming the right of slave owners to take their slaves into the Western territories, therebynegating the doctrine of popular sovereignty and severely undermining the platform of the newly created Republican Party. -
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Historians have traditionally regarded the series of seven debates between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois state election campaign as among the most significant statements in American political history. The issues they discussed were not only of critical importance to the sectional conflict over slavery and states’ rights but also touched deeper questions that would continue to influence political discourse. -
John Brown Raids Harpers Ferry, Virginia
The raid was intended to be the first stage in an elaborate plan to establish an independent stronghold of freed slaves in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia. Brown was captured during the raid and later convicted of treason and hanged, but the raid inflamed white Southern fears of slave rebellions and increased the mounting tension between Northern and Southern states before the American Civil War (1861-65). -
Abraham Lincoln Wins the Presidential Election
Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois. -
South Carolina Secedes from the United States of America
Secession, as it applies to the outbreak of the American Civil War, comprises the series of events extended through June 8 of the next year when eleven states in the Lower and Upper South severed their ties with the Union. -
The Great Depression
The Great Depression (1929-39) was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.
