Timeline for the Sectional Crisis
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- 1787 // Constitution and slavery plus Northwest Ordinance passed by Confederation Congress
- 1789 // French Revolution begins
- 1803 // Haitian independence and Louisiana Purchase
- 1820 // Missouri Compromise
- 1831 // William Lloyd Garrison launches abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator
- 1842 // Supreme Court rules against state personal liberty laws in Prigg v. Pennsylvania
- 1845 // Statehood for new slave states in Florida and Texas
- 1846 // Wilmot Proviso fails in Congress
- 1848 // End of Mexican War and launch of Free Soil Party
- 1849 // California Gold Rush
- 1850 // Compromise includes admission of California as free state and tougher Fugitive Slave Law
- 1851 // Christiana resistance signals ongoing battles over personal liberty and fugitive slaves
- 1854 // Kansas-Nebraska Act and emergence of Republican Party
- 1854 // Fugitive slave crises over Anthony Burns, Joshua Glover and slave stampedes in St. Louis
- 1855 // Violence erupts in “Bleeding Kansas” and continues sporadically through late 1850s
- 1856 // Senator Charles Sumner assaulted on US senate floor
- 1856 // Democrat James Buchanan (Dickinson Class of 1809) wins presidency in three-way contest against Republican John Fremont and American (Know Nothing) Millard Fillmore
- 1857 // Dred Scott Decision
- 1858 // Lincoln – (Stephen) Douglas Debates in Illinois
- 1859 // John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry
- 1860 // Election of Abraham Lincoln as nation’s first Republican president
- 1861 // Seven seceded states from Deep South organize Confederate States of America (CSA)
- 1861 // Lincoln inaugurated as sixteenth president
Discussion Question
- Both John Brown and Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery and yet their strategies were starkly different. Why and how did they differ in their approach to ending slavery in America?
John Brown’s First Raid (1858-9): Vernon County, MO to Detroit, MI
