Vermont Historical Society

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Use the links below to find more information about each event 

1817

• The American Colonization Society formed.

1820

• The Missouri Compromise: Missouri was admitted as a slave state.
• Maine was admitted as a free state. 
• The rest of the Louisiana Territory was free. 

1822

• Colony established on the West Coast of Africa, this eventually would become the nation of Liberia.

1831

• The Liberator begins publication. This newspaper, published by William Lloyd Garrison, spread the belief of immediate emancipation.

1833

• The American Anti-Slavery Society formed.

1849

• California applies for admission to the Union as a free state.

1850

• Compromise of 1850.
• California was admitted as a free state.
• The Texas boundary was set at its present limits.
• The territories of New Mexico and Utah were organized.
• A stronger fugitive slave law was enacted.
• The slave trade was suppressed in the District of Columbia.

1852

• Publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

1854

• Kansas-Nebraska Act: allowed residents in the new territories to decide for themselves whether or not there would be slavery. This act invalidated the Compromise of 1820.

1857

• The Dred Scott Decision: this court decision stated that Dred Scott was not a citizen; that residence in a free territory did not make Scott free; and that Congress lacked the power to bar slavery from a territory, as it had done in the Missouri Compromise.
• Resolution passed in the Georgia Senate: “Resolved, that his Excellency President Pierce, be requested to employ a sufficient number of able-bodied Irishmen to proceed to the State of Vermont and dig a ditch around the limits of the same, and float ‘the thing’ into the Atlantic.”

1858

• The Lincoln-Douglas debates

1859

• John Brown raids Harpers Ferry. 

1860

• Democratic party splits in half.
• Abraham Lincoln elected president.
• South Carolina secedes from the Union.

1861

• Confederacy established.
• Attack on Fort Sumter.

1863

• Emancipation Proclamation delivered by Abraham Lincoln, declaring freedom for slaves who lived in rebelling states.

1868

• Fourteenth Amendment ratified.

1870

• Fifteenth Amendment ratified.