The Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850. The Act pleased southerners not only because it allowed slave owners to retrieve their property from anywhere in the country, but it gave other people the power to retrieve them as well. In fact, if officials did not turn in fugitive slaves, they could be fined 1,000. This measure of the act served to directly overturn...
The fight over whether Kansas should be a slave or a free state raged throughout the summer of 1856 in Kansas, Missouri and other surrounding areas. The Free State militia won ground in the ongoing battle by seizing the town of Franklin, a pro slavery stronghold in August, but the Pro-Slavery men would not capitulate and they proved victorious in many clashes as well. Skirmishes continued through...
John Brown, also known as Fed, was born into slavery in Virginia. As a child, he was separated from his family, and was sold and purchased by three different masters. Brown suffered from many acts of cruelty from his masters: he lost partial use of one eye after being kicked in the face repeatedly by an overseer. He was also used in a number of gruesome experiments performed by a doctor who was...
Preaching to his Philadelphia congregation, Reverend Dudley A. Tyng spoke out against the violent acts committed by Southerners in attempts to have Kansas admitted to the Union as a slave state. “The blood of a Senator has stained the floor of the Senate Chamber,” said Tyng in his June 29, 1856, sermon, and “the blood of her citizens has been poured out like water on the virgin soil of Kansas,...
The "chastisement of Senator Sumner" by Senator Brooks in the United States Senate came under heavy criticism in both the Northern and Southern United States. While the Northern reaction was a more conciliatory tone towards Sumner and one that called for the punishment of Brooks, the Southern reaction was that it was a ploy by Northern abolitionists to further the fight to end their way of life,...
In 1850, the Midwest remained largely undeveloped and in the eyes of many New Englanders it seemed a very profitable proposition. By 1854, the territories were created by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left these states with the ability to decide if the slave trade would be legal in their territories. Many Anti-Nebraskans, such as Indiana Representative Schuyler Colfax, remained dedicated to the...
Harriet Beecher Stowe just published Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp in 1856. In the book, Stowe posits that slavery caused the corrosion of society. Dred is the second book by Stowe that centered on the topic of slavery. Stowe's first work, Uncle Tom's Cabin which was published in 1853, also addressed the issue of slavery and highlighted the institutions' inadequacies. Raised...
Xenophobic men established the Know Nothing or American Party in the late 1940s in response to the growing number of immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics flooding into the United States because of the Irish Famine of 1845. They were known as the Know Nothing Party because when asked questions about the organization and their affiliation with it, members responded that they knew nothing. The...
Throughout the month of May 1856, the Abingdon Virginian newspaper printed the name of the town's choice for president in the upcoming presidential election. Their choice for president was Millard Fillmore of New York, and for vice president Andrew U. Donelson of Tennessee, nominated by the American Party. There was no further explanation for this information, but rather an announcement...
On May 19, 1856, C.M. Siller wrote a letter to his friend J.L. Twyman, a resident of Buchanan County, Virginia. From his room at the Washington Hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia, Siller described the details of his train ride to Anderson, South Carolina two weeks earlier. His three-page letter discussed in great depth the landscape of the various towns he saw, as well as the agricultural production of...