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Abolition Timeline (1820-1859)
1820
President James Monroe orders first U.S. Navy patrol against slave ships on West African coast
1822
The
first settlers found the colony of Liberia, for freed African American slaves returning to Africa. Over the 1820s, some 1,400
blacks immigrate from the U.S. to the colony.
Denmark Vesey slave revolt plot uncovered in Charleston, South Carolina,
and conspirators executed.
1825
But the ruling sets only 80% of the Africans free. U.S. law by this point
defined the slave trade as piracy, but the court held that U.S. could not prescribe law for other nations -- and noted that
the slave trade was legal as far as Spain, Portugal, Venezuela were concerned. Vessel was restored. Those Africans designated
as Spanish property (numbering 39) the court recognized as property and sold into slavery on behalf of claimants. Portuguese
claims the court found shakier, setting those Africans free.
1827
Jim Pembroke, a slave in Maryland, escapes
and begins making his way northward, where he will rename himself James W.C. Pennington and rise to prominence within the
African-American abolition movement.
1829
David Walker, a free African-American, publishes Appeal to the
Coloured Citizens of the World, a radical pamphlet attacking slavery and the colonization movement. The Appeal invokes the
rhetoric and spirit of the American Revolution, demanding: "See your Declaration, Americans!!! Do you understand your own
language?"
Copies of the Appeal soon begin turning up in Southern ports, probably secretly distributed by free African-American
seamen.
1831
January 1: William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing the Liberator.
August 22: In Southhampton
County, Virginia, Nathaniel Turner leads a small slave uprising that quickly spreads to neighboring plantations and within
a few days kills some 60 whites before local militia contain the revolt. In reprisal, scores of slaves are interrogated, tortured,
and killed by panicked slaveholders. Turner himself eludes captures for a few months, but is eventually jailed and executed.
December:
The Virginia legislature begins debating emancipation -- the last viable movement for abolition coming from within a southern
state until the Civil War.
1833
William Lloyd Garrison and others found the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Connecticut
passes the “Black Law,” barring blacks from attending private schools outside their resident towns without permission
from town leaders. In Canterbury, CT, Prudence Crandell, a white school teacher, is prosecuted several times under this law.
1834
An
anti-abolitionist mob sacks the home of prominent New York abolitionist Lewis Tappan, part of a savage riot that also destroys
the home and church of African-American Episcopal Reverend Peter Williams.
1836
May 25: in response to petitions
calling on Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, the House of Representatives implements the “gag
rule,” automatically tabling abolitionist petitions. The policy is repeatedly renewed over the coming years.
1837
Abolitionist
and editor Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy is murdered by an anti-abolitionist mob in Alton, Illinois.
An Antislavery Convention
of American Women meets in New York City with both black and white women participating.
African-Americans lose the
right to vote in Pennsylvania (by amendment to the State Constitution) and Michigan (by state law). In New York, African-Americans
petition the state legislature for voting rights.
1838
September: Frederick Baily escapes slavery, making
his way from Baltimore to New York City, and from there to New Bedford, where he takes on a new name, Frederick Douglass.
A
Philadelphia mob destroys the Pennsylvania Hall, where abolitionists have held meetings, then goes on a rampage burning and
terrorizing African-American neighborhoods. Municipal authorities do nothing to halt the carnage.
Joshua R. Giddings
of Ohio is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first avowed abolitionist Congressman.
Rev. James W.C.
Pennington, who would minister to the Amistad Africans, pastors an African Congregational Church at Newtown, Connecticut.
In 1840 he moves to a new congregation in Hartford. In 1841 he publishes A Textbook of the Origin and History of the Colored
People, the first history of its kind.
August 27: The Amistad is taken into New London.
November 13: The Liberty Party holds its first national convention
in Warsaw, New York, proclaiming its anti-slavery program and nominating James C. Birney for President.
Among the Liberty
Party's leading supporters is African-American abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet.
Theodore Dwight Weld publishes American
Slavery as it is, a powerful indictment of slavery.
Garrisonians take control of the American Anti-Slavery Society
and radicalize its platform, demanding the immediate abolition of slavery.
President Martin Van Buren orders U.S. Navy
to resume West African patrols.
1840
Division in American Anti-Slavery Society over role of women weakens
abolitionist efforts
1841
March 9: The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the freedom of the Amistad Africans.
Frederick
Douglass is hired by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society as a full-time lecturer.
1842
August 9: The
U.S. and Great Britian sign the Webster-Ashburn Treaty, adjusting boundaries between the U.S. and Canada, and agreeing to
cooperate on suppressing the slave trade.
In Boston, escaped slave George Lattimore is captured by bounty hunters --
the first in a series of confrontational fugitive slave cases. Abolitionists raise funds to purchase Lattimore's freedom.
In
Philadelphia, a parade commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies is attacked by a proslavery mob.
1843
Sojourner
Truth, an African-American woman who escaped from slavery, begins lecturing for abolitionism.
Rev. Henry Highland Garnet
delivers a "Call to Rebellion" at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York, exhorting African-Americans to resist
slavery by means of armed rebellion (and holding up Cinque, among others, as heroes in the cause).
At the party convention
for the Liberty Party in Buffalo, African-Americans participate directly for the first time, with Henry Highland Garnet serving
on the nominating committee and two other black clergymen, Rev. Charles B. Ray and Rev. Samuel Ringgold, also playing prominent
roles.
1848
Slavery entirely prohibited in Connecticut by state law.
1850
Compromise of
1850 admits California as free state, eliminates slave trade in District of Columbia, establishes Utah and New Mexico without
restrictions on slavery, and requires return of fugitive slaves.
1854
Kansas-Nebraska Act repeals Missouri
Compromise, allowing popular sovereignty to determine slave- or free-state status of territories seeking statehood, which
increases sectional division within the U.S. and breaks down traditional two-party system, giving rise to Republican Party.
1857
Dred Scott decision by Supreme Court denies any possibility of citizenship for African Americans, imperils
fugitive slaves, and sets back cause of abolition.
1859
John Brown’s unsuccessful Harper’s Ferry,
Virginia, raid to incite slave rebellion heightens tension over slavery.
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