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Nat Turner Slave Revolt
Rebel slaves killed from 55 to 65 people, at least 51 being white. The rebellion was put down within a few days, but Turner survived in hiding for more than two months afterward -
William Lloyd Garrison's "The Liberator"
A religious newspaper that appealed to the moral conscience of its readers, urging them to demand the freedom of the slaves and also promoted women’s rights. -
American Anti-Slavery Society Begins
An abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, was a key leader of this society who often spoke at its meetings while William Wells Brown was also a freed slave who often spoke at meetings. -
Sarah Grimke's Letters are published
Sarah argues about the conditions in which women are living in and the equality of their rights' compared to those of a man's. -
Henry Highland Garnet's Address
a newspaper editor and pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, however captured most of the attention of the delegates with his Address in which he called for their open rebellion. However; The speech failed by one vote of being endorsed by the convention -
Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls
The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women's rights convention and advertised itself as "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman" -
Harriett Tubman Escapes from Slavery
Harriett Tubman escaped from slavery in Maryland and fled to Philadelphia, she feared that her family would be further severed and was concerned for her own fate as a sickly slave of low economic value. -
Democratic Party splits into two halves
By the late 1850s, the Democratic Party was split over the issue of slavery. Northern Democrats generally opposed slavery's expansion while many Southern Democrats believed that slavery should exist across the United States -
Compromise of 1850
Henry Clay introduced a bill that ended up making California a free state, defining the borders between the US and New Mexico, banned slavery in Washington DC, and then made the Fugitive Slave Law -
Fugitive Slave Act
A law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, which provided southern slaveholders with legal weapons to capture slaves who had escaped to the free states. -
Sojourner Truth Delivers her "Ain't I a Woman" Speech
Truth's speech delivers a powerful speech talking about the treatment of women and how everyone believes them to be fragile and frail, leading into her most powerful point ; the treatment of black woman. She's worked like a man and considered less than a woman -
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Several stories intertwine throughout Uncle Tom's Cabin, but they all center on two main plots. One plot focuses on the Harris family, the other on Uncle Tom. Mr. Shelby is a considerate master, but he must sell Tom to Haley, the slave trader, to pay off some debts -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas aka The Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in the United States which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30 -
Republican Party Founded
Anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is generally remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party. -
Dread Scott Decision
An enslaved African American man in the United States who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857 -
Lecompton Constitution
By Southern pro-slavery advocates of Kansas statehood. It contained clauses protecting slaveholding and a bill of rights excluding free blacks -
Panic of 1857
A financial panic in the United States caused by the declining international economy and over-expansion of the domestic economy. -
Linocln-Douglas Debates
The Lincoln–Douglas debates were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate and Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. It was important because it discussed the issue on slavery and what each candidate believed in. -
John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry
An effort by abolitionist John Brown to initiate an armed slave revolt in 1859 by taking over a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown's party of 22 was defeated by a company of U.S. Marines, led by First Lieutenant Israel Greene. -
South Carolina seceded from the United States
When the ordinance was adopted on December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first slave state in the south to declare that it had seceded from the United States. (Becoming it's own, new country) -
Abraham Lincoln Elected President
On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States, beating Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell. He was the first president from the Republican Party. -
Confederate States of America Founded
The initial Confederacy was established in the Montgomery Convention in February 1861 by seven states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, adding Texas in March before Lincoln's inauguration), -
Firing on Fort Sumter
The Battle of Fort Sumter was the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina by the Confederate States Army, and the return gunfire and subsequent surrender by the United States Army, that started the American Civil War -
Battle of Antietam
General Lee had hoped to defeat the Union on Union soil and force the North to give up on the war. The Union won the Battle of Antietam, although both sides experienced heavy casualties. With 23,000 casualties, this was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. -
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. -
Gettysburg Address
It's dedication of Soldier's National Cemetery, a cemetery for Union soldiers killed at the Battle Of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. -
Battle of Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg 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 -
Congress passed the 13th amendment
The Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. -
General Grant Assumed Command of Union Troops
President Abraham Lincoln signs a brief document officially promoting then-Major General Ulysses S. Grant to the rank of lieutenant general of the U.S. Army, tasking the future president with the job of leading all Union troops against the Confederate Army -
Sherman's March To the Sea
A general in the Union army during the American Civil War, is best known for his March to the Sea. On September 1, 1864, Sherman and his army captured Atlanta, Georgia, an important transportation center in the Confederacy. -
Abraham Lincoln Reelected
The 1864 election was the first time since 1812 that a presidential election took place during a war. For much of 1864, Lincoln himself believed he had little chance of being re-elected -
Lee Surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House
It was here in Virginia, that Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, setting the stage for the end of the four-year civil war -
Johnson Announced Plans for Presidental Reconstruction
The plan of Reconstruction that gave the white South a free hand in regulating the transition from slavery to freedom and offered no role to blacks in the politics of the South. -
Arrivals of Scalawags and Carpetbaggers
The term “carpetbaggers” refers to Northerners who moved to the South after the Civil War, during Reconstruction. Many carpetbaggers were said to have moved South for their own financial and political gains. Scalawags were white Southerners who cooperated politically with black freedmen and Northern newcomers. -
Freedman's Bureau Established
The first kind of primitive welfare agency used to provide food, clothing, medical care, and education to freedman and to white refugees.First to establish school for blacks to learn to read. A plan in 1864 for Reconstruction that denied the right to vote or hold office for anyone who had fought for the Confederacy -
Lincoln Assassination
At Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., on the evening of April 14, 1865. Shot in the head by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln died the next morning. -
Civil Rights Act passed over Johnson's Veto
A Republican-dominated Congress enacted a landmark Civil Rights Act on this day in 1866, overriding a veto by President Andrew Johnson. The law's chief thrust was to offer protection to slaves freed in the aftermath of the Civil War -
KKK Formed
In the summer of 1867, the Klan was structured into the “Invisible Empire of the South” at a convention in Nashville, Tennessee, attended by delegates from former Confederate states. -
First Congressional Reconstruction Act passed
U.S. legislation enacted in 1867–68 that outlined the conditions under which the Southern states would be readmitted to the Union following the American Civil War -
Andrew Johnson Impeached
The House of Representatives resolved to impeach U.S. President Andrew Johnson, adopting eleven articles of impeachment detailing his "high crimes and misdemeanors", in accordance with Article Two -
U.S. Grant Elected President
In the first election of the Reconstruction Era, Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant defeated Democrat Horatio Seymour. -
Creation of the Radical Republicans
Grant was elected as a Republican in 1868 and after the election he generally sided with the Radicals on Reconstruction policies and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1871 into law. -
14th Amendment Ratified
Thee 14th amendment granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including former slaves—and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws.” -
15th Amendment Ratified
The 15th amendment granted African American men the right to vote -
Salughterhouse Cases
The Slaughterhouse Cases, resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873, ruled that a citizen's "privileges and immunities," as protected by the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment against the states, were limited to those spelled out in the Constitution and did not include many rights given by the individual states. -
Andrew Johnson Became President
The 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. Johnson assumed the presidency as he was vice president of the United States at the time of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. -
US v Cruikshank
An important United States Supreme Court decision in United States constitutional law, one of the earliest to deal with the application of the Bill of Rights to state governments following the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Compromise of 1877
The Compromise of 1877 was an informal, unwritten deal, that settled the intensely disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election. It resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the South, and formally ended the Reconstruction Era.
