![]() These states form the Confederate States of America, elect Jefferson Davis as their president and draft a constitution which mimics that of the United States except for an explicit endorsement of slavery. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas all commit to secession in 1861. The Ordinance of Secession cites Northern hostility to slavery and the election of a sectional party as reasons for the state’s action.Įxtension of secession and the formation of the Confederacy South Carolina, one of the richest states in the country, is the first to secede in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s election. He wins the presidential election without carrying a single Southern vote. Republican Party candidate Abraham Lincoln becomes the 16th President of the United States. This event is often seen as the last notable flashpoint of sectional tension before the outbreak of the Civil War. Brown was caught and sentenced to death his hanging witnessed by Abraham Lincoln’s assassinator John Wilkes Booth. Marines, under the command of future Confederate General Robert E. Contemporary Southern accounts blamed the recently-formed Republican Party and their anti-slavery platform for inspiring violence. The raid sparked a national outcry both for and against Brown’s actions. He believed slavery could only be ended by violent means. John Brown attempts to lead an armed slave insurrection by seizing a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Although he lost the election, much of what Lincoln said in the debates went on to form his presidential campaign in 1860. Their speeches were circulated beyond the state and serve as a nuanced discussion of the problem of slavery and its future. Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln engage in a seven debates during the Senate election campaign. Slave-holders flock into Kansas to secure their allegiance, sparking clashes with free-state Northerners on a scale that threatens civil war. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act overturns the Missouri Compromise by ceding rights to individual states to decide whether to be free or slave-holding through the process of Popular Sovereignty. ![]() One famous example from 1852 was Mary Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which gained tremendous readership and publicity for the abolitionist cause. Many abolitionist tracts and slave narratives make reference to the act to highlight Northern complicity towards the institution of slavery. The act galvanises abolitionists as it implicated free states in maintaining the slave system by including clauses that meant anyone aiding runaway slaves would be subject to fines and imprisonment. Missouri is admitted to the Union as a slave state but in the future, states north of Missouri and the 36☃0′ latitude line would be admitted only if they were free (except for California, which was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state despite the parallel divide).Ĭongress is denied interference in the slave trade between states, enabling Southern slave-owners to take free blacks from the North. The more populous North had come to dominate the House of Representatives and the South now sought to redress the balance. Since the beginning of the nineteenth-century, the political balance between North and South had been maintained by admitting alternately slave and free states. The internal trade grows as Northern owners sell their slaves, creating what historians have labelled a ‘Second Middle Passage’ within America. Northern states begin a gradual process of ending slavery, but the institution strengthens in the South as cotton production expands. The United States bans the import and export of slaves, one year after Great Britain abolished the slave trade. Several decades of debate and compromise over slavery’s expansion westwards follow. The western territories, a vast expanse of land stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, are acquired by the United States from France for over eleven million dollars. In approving the Declaration, Congress set a precedent that outlined the rights of a people to abandon their former political allegiances and 'to institute new government.'Įli Whitney’s invention revolutionises cotton production in the South, eventually leading to cotton succeeding tobacco as the most profitable trade commodity in the United States. Thomas Jefferson draws up the Declaration of Independence to assert the sovereign rights of the American colonists. Rhode Island becomes the first of the original Thirteen Colonies to introduce anti-slavery laws that would accentuate the divide between Northern and Southern states.
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