Time Line - Period 5

By Nathaniel Feliciano

  • Fugitive Slave Law

    In effect, therefore, enforcement of the new law drove a wedge between the North and the South. Enforcement and Opposition The law's chief purpose was to track down runaway slaves who had escaped to a Northern state and return them to their Southern owners. Captured persons who claimed to be a free African American and not a runaway slave were denied the right of trial by jury. Citizens who attempted to hide a runaway or obstruct enforcement of the law were subject to heavy penalties.

  • Uncle Tom's Cabin

    About the conflict between an enslaved man named Tom and the brutal white slave owner Simon Legree. Uncle Tom's Cabin moved a generation of Northerners as well as many Europeans to regard all slave owners as monstrously cruel and inhuman. Southerners condemned the "untruths" in the novel and looked upon it as one more proof of the North's incurable prejudice against the Southern way of life.

  • Secession of the Deep South

    Representatives of the seven states of the Deep South met in Montgomery, Alabama, and created the Confederate States of America. The constitution of this would-be Southern nation was similar to the U.S. Constitution, except that the Confederacy placed limits on the government's power to impose tariffs and restrict slavery.

  • Wade Davis Bill

    Required 50 percent of the voters of a state to take a loyalty oath and permitted only non-Confederates to vote for a new state constitution. Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, which proposed far more demanding and stringent terms for Reconstruction, than Lincolns plan.

  • Civil Rights Act of 1866

    Pronounced all African Americans to be U.S. citizens (thereby repudiating the decision in the Dred Scott case) and also attempted to provide a legal shield against the operation of the Southern states' Black Codes.

  • The Amnesty Act

    Removed the last of the restrictions on ex-Confederates, except for the top leaders. The chief political consequence of the Amnesty Act was that it allowed Southern conservatives to vote for Democrats to retake control of state governments.