On January 16, 1828 The Geneva Gazette, a newspaper in Geneva, New York, published an article from an anonymous citizen. The article was addressed to the paper’s editor and criticized the lack of an adequate establishment for the education of young ladies in the town. The author argued that women’s education was necessary in order for women to better educate their children. Two months...
What became the state of Texas was in 1830 still a part of the nation of Mexico. However, for many years Mexico had been encouraging U.S. citizens to emigrate and settle what to the Mexican government was its far away northern provinces -- provinces that were sparsely settled and thus perfect for the Americans. As the Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser reports on January 8, 1830, “the...
The Census of 1830 reported that out of a total of population of 12,858,670 people, there were 2,009,050 enslaved and 319,576 free blacks. It is no wonder, therefore, that in what is still primarily a slave-based economy, especially in the South, Americans began to wonder what to do with this growing free black population. After all, how could formerly enslaved blacks fit into white society when...
On January 15, 1830, the Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser included a report “respecting the state and progress of this important work,' the Louisville-Portland Canal, and the specific methods and requirements of its construction. Finished later in 1830, the Canal, which stretches mostly through Kentucky, allowed steamboat travel to avoid the impassable Ohio River Falls and continue...
In December 1829, Josiah F. Polk and Philip Lindsey created the Tennessee Colonization Society in Nashville. Polk and Lindsey's society was a branch of the American Colonization Society whose goal was to repatriate free slaves to Liberia in Africa. They started to try to convince free slaves to leave the United States as soon as the Society was created in 1829. If the slaves were not free, members...
On January 26 and 27, 1830, senators Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts got into a heated debate that captured many of the issues that threatened to tear the nation apart. The main issues involved the tariff and nullification. Two days prior to Webster’s reply, Hayne delivered a speech in Congress that attacked Webster by questioning his loyalty to the Constitution....
Many slaves throughout the 1800's sought to escape bondage in any way they could, and though this usually resulted in them running away, occasionally they turned to a more extreme means of escape. The Baton Rouge Gazette reports on January 30, 1830, that “on Saturday night last about 10 o'clock Mr. John Whitten was killed by one of his own slaves, by a discharge from a musket loaded...
When Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut introduced a bill to limit the sale of Western lands to reduce tensions with Native-Americans and to slow the spread of slavery, he probably knowingly set off a fury among Southern land speculators and agriculturalists. This, in combination with the Tariff of 1828 -- which many Southerners saw as a direct assault on their well being -- was seen as a violation...
On January 1st, 1830, a bill was placed before the Virginia legislature ““to incorporate the Trustees of Randolph Macon College'' as reported by the Richmond Enquirer on February 4, 1830. Passed on February 3, the bill established a college at Boydton, Virginia, near the border with North Carolina. Though founded by Virginia Methodists, according to Randolph Macon's website...
With a sound "resembling the discharge of a small piece of artillery" and "the rushing sound of steam, and the rattling of glass", the starboard boiler on the steamboat Helen McGregor exploded on February 24, 1830 on the Memphis waterfront. In The Mariner's Chronicle, one gentleman on board described the scene in the boiler room as a "complete wreck - a picture of destruction". He...