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Missouri Compromise
During Monroe's presidency, Congress passed a series of agreement called the Missouri Compromise. Under these agreements, Maine was admitted as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. The rest of the Louisiana Territory was split into two parts: south of the line, slavery was legal, and north of the line, slavery was banned. -
Santa Fe Trail
The Santa Fe trail was one of the busiest routes towards the west, stretching 780 miles from Independence, Missouuri to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Every year from 1821 into the 1860s, American traders would load up their goods and travel towards Santa Fe. -
San Felipe de Austin
The main settlement of the colony was San Felipe de Austin, in dedication to Stephen. By 1825, Austin had donated 297 land grants to a group called Texas' Old Three Hundred. By 1830, there were maore than 20,000 Americans in Texas. -
The Liberator
The Liberator, established by William Lloyd Garrison,was the most radical antislavery paper in 1828. -
Mexico abolishes slavery
In 1829 the Guerrero decree conditionally abolished slavery throughout Mexican territories. It was a decision that increased tensions with slaveholders among the Anglo-Americans. After the Texas Revolution ended in 1836, the Constitution of the Republic of Texas made slavery legal. -
Nat Turner's Rebellion
In August 1831, Turner and more than 50 followers attacked four
plantations and killed about 60 whites. Whites eventually captured and executed many members of the group, including Turner. -
Stephen F. Astin goes to jail
Escalating the tensions that would lead to rebellion and war, the Mexican government imprisons the Texas colonizer Stephen Austin in Mexico City. -
Texas Revolution
The Texas Revolution began when colonists in the Mexican province of Texas rebelled against the increasingly centralist Mexican government. After a decade of political and cultural clashes between the Mexican government and the increasingly large population of American settlers in Texas, hostilities erupted in October 1835. -
Oregon Trail
The Oregon trail spans from Independnce, Missouri to Oregon City, Oregon.It was founded in 1836 by two methodist missionaries: Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. The Oregon Trail proved that wagons could travel on the trail. -
Manifest Destiny
The phrase, "manifest destiny" expressed the belief that the united Sates was destined to expand their territory to the pacific ocean and the mexican and Native American territory. -
Texas enters the United States
Six months after the congress of the Republic of Texas accepts U.S. annexation of the territory, Texas is admitted into the United States as the 28th state. -
Mexican-American war
In the United States, the conflict lasting from 1846-1848 is termed the Mexican–American War. It was an armed conflict between the United States and the Centralist Republic of Mexico (which became the Second Federal Republic of Mexico during the war). It followed in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory, despite the 1836 Texas Revolution. -
The North Star
In 1847, Frederick Douglass began his own antislavery newspaper called The North Star, after the star that giuded runaway slaves to freedom. -
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was officially the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic. It is the peace treaty signed on February 2, 1848, in the Villa de Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico that ended the Mexican–American War -
Abolition
Abolition, the movement to abolish
slavery, became the most important of a series of reform movements in America. -
Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850, which defused a four-year political confrontation between slave and free states regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War. -
Fugitive Slave Act
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. Enacted by Congress in 1793, the first Fugitive Slave Act authorized local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who aided in their flight. Widespread resistance to the 1793 law later led to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which added further provisions regarding runaways an -
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
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. Proposed by Stephen A. Douglas–Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the influential Lincoln-Douglas debates–the bill overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory. -
dreadScott vs. Sandford
Dred Scott v. Sandford, was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be American citizens. Dred Scott, an enslaved African American man who had been taken by his owners to free states and territories, attempted to sue for his freedom. the Court denied Scott's request, and for only the second time to that point in its history, the Supreme Court ruled an Act of Congress to be unconstitutional. -
Abraham Lincoln and Stephe Douglass debates
The Lincoln–Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. -
John Brown's Raid/Harpers Ferry
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was an attempt by the white abolitionist John Brown to start an armed slave revolt in 1859 by seizing a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. -
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and, during the American Civil War, a Union spy. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad -
underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century enslaved people of African descent in the United States in efforts to escape to free states and Canada led by Harriet Tubman. -
Abraham Lincoln becomes President
By the time of Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded, and the Confederate States of America had been formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its elected president. One month later, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. -
Income Tax
Lincoln imposes the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. Strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800. -
Attack on fort Sumter
The Battle of Fort Sumter was the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter, near Charleston, South Carolina, that started the American Civil War. -
Battle of Bull Run
The First Battle of Bull Run, also known as First Manassas, was fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia, near the city of Manassas, not far from the city of Washington, D.C.It was a Confederate victory followed by a disorganized retreat of the Union forces. -
Formation of the Confederacy
States began seceding after the Election of Abraham Lincoln, even before he was inaugurated. South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia , Louisiana, and Texas. On February 4, 1861, the states farthest south, where slavery and plantations agriculture were dominant, formed the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as President. They establishe -
Battle of Antietam
The Battle of Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the South, fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek as part of the Maryland Campaign, was the first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Union soil. It is the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with a combined tally of dead, wounded, and missing at 22,717. -
Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." -
Conscription
During the Civil War, the government of the Confederate States of America also enacted a compulsory military draft. -
Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, one of the best-known in American history. It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War, on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. -
Battle at Vicksburg
The Siege of Vicksburg was the final major military action in the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of maneuvers, Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the Confederate Army of Mississippi into the defensive lines surrounding the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. -
Battle at Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863, is considered the most important engagement of the American Civil War. After a great victory over Union forces at Chancellorsville, General Robert E. Lee marched his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania in late June 1863. -
Sherman's March
Sherman's March to the Sea is the name commonly given to the military Savannah Campaign in the American Civil War, conducted through Georgia from November 15 to December 21, 1864 by William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army. -
Surrender at Appomattox Court House
On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his approximately 28,000 troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in the front parlor of Wilmer McLean's home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. -
Thirteenth Amendment
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. -
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
In 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C., and fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln.
