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The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad, a vast network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the North and to Canada, was not run by any single organization or person. Rather, it consisted of many individuals -- many whites but predominently black -- who knew only of the local efforts to aid fugitives and not of the overall operation. Still, it effectively moved hundreds of slaves northward each year -- according to one estimate, the South lost 100,000 slaves between 1810 and 1850. -
The Invention of the Cotton Gin
In 1793, Eli Whitney invented a simple machine that influenced the history of the United States. He invented a cotton gin that was popular in the South. The South became the cotton producing part of the country because Whitney’s cotton gin was able to successfully pull out the seeds from the cotton bolls. -
The Missouri Compromise
The institution of slavery had been a divisive issue in the United States for decades before the territory of Missouri petitioned Congress for admission to the Union as a state in 1818. Since the Revolution, the country had grown from 13 states to 22 and had managed to maintain a balance of power between slave and free states. -
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
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. -
Compromise of 1850
The plan was set forth. The giants — Calhoun, Webster, and Clay — had spoken. Still the Congress debated the contentious issues well into the summer. Each time Clay's Compromise was set forth for a vote, it did not receive a majority. Henry Clay himself had to leave in sickness, before the dispute could be resolved. In his place, Stephen Douglas worked tirelessly to end the fight. On July 9, President Zachary Taylor died of food poisoning. -
The Canning of Charles Sumner
The Senate was not in session when South Carolina Representative Preston S. Brooks entered the chamber to avenge the insults that Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner had levelled at Brooks' cousin, Senator Andrew P. Butler. Sumner's "Crime Against Kansas" speech of May 19-20 was sharply critical, on a personal level, of Butler and several other senators who had supported the "popular sovereignty" provisions of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. -
The Election of Lincoln—1860
he polls had barely closed on the 1858 election when Jeriah Bonham wrote an editorial for the Illinois Gazette predicting the candidates for the 1860 presidential nomination: “Douglas will lead the cohorts of slavery. Lincoln should lead the hosts of freedom in this ‘irrepressible conflict.’ Who has earned the proud position as well as he? as he is in himself the embodiment and exponent of our free institutions. -
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is written
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman.
