-
A Dutch ship brings 20 African indentured servants to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia.
-
A passage by Thomas Jefferson condemning the slave trade is removed from the Declaration of Independence due to pressure from the southern colonies. For more information, see Africans in America, Pt. 1, The Terrible Transformation.
-
Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Act, which makes it a crime to harbor an escaped slave.
-
More than a century before the first modern-day civil rights march, Charles Deslondes and his make-do army of more than 200 enslaved men battled with hoes, axes and cane knives for that most basic human right: freedom.
-
This legislation admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a non-slave state at the same time, so as not to upset the balance between slave and free states in the nation. It also outlawed slavery above the 36º 30´ latitude line in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory.
-
The Compromise of 1850 was actually a series of bills passed mainly to address issues related to slavery. The bills provided for slavery to be decided by popular sovereignty in the admission of new states, prohibited the slave trade in the District of Columbia, settled a Texas boundary dispute, and established a stricter fugitive slave act. This featured document is Henry Clay's handwritten draft.
-
In January 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas introduced a bill that divided the land west of Missouri into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. As a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the United States moved closer to Civil War.
-
For more information, see John David Hoptak, "Baltimore, Bricks, and First Blood", courtesy of HistoryNet.com. Just days after Fort Sumter, a pro-Confederate mob in Baltimore, Maryland turned ex-slave Nicholas Biddle into the war's first casualty.
-
On Aug. 30, 1861, Union Gen. John C. Fremont instituted martial law in Missouri and declared slaves there to be free. (However, Fremont's emancipation order was countermanded by President Abraham Lincoln).
-
The War Department issued General Order 143 on May 22, 1863, creating the United States Colored Troops. By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10 percent of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army, and another 19,000 served in the Navy.
-
Near the end of the Civil War, this bill created a framework for Reconstruction and the readmittance of the Confederate states to the Union. Although Lincoln used a pocket veto to kill it, after his assassination the Republican Congress passed the measure requiring among other things, that southern states give the Negro the right to vote.
-
Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States.
-
Passed by Congress June 13, 1866, and ratified July 9, 1868, the 14th amendment extended liberties and rights granted by the Bill of Rights to former slaves.
-
In 1868, the same year the state rejected the 15th Amendment giving blacks the right to vote, Dawson Pompey became the first African American to hold elective office in Michigan when Covert residents chose him to oversee local road projects. Source : Zlati Meyer, "Rural west Michigan Covert Township Integrated Quietly in the 1860s", Detroit Free Press, September 5, 2011.
-
Passed by Congress February 26, 1869, and ratified February 3, 1870, the 15th amendment granted African American men the right to vote. At the same time, however, the segregation law is passed in Tennessee mandating the separation of African Americans from whites. In short order, the rest of the South falls into step.