At the beginning of 1854, Anthony Burns was a slave in Richmond, Virginia. He also worked as a deliveryman for a druggist named Mr. Millspaugh. One February day, after a delivery, Anthony secretly boarded a "Baltimore clipper" headed to Boston with the goal of finally attaining his freedom. He spent three grueling weeks balled up in a space hardly big enough for his body, fighting the cold and...
On Capitol Hill, Sen. Houston spoke in opposition to the passage of the Nebraska Bill on the grounds of violation of Indian treaties. The National Intelligencer wrote that he reminded his fellow senators that the good faith of this Government was pledged on more than one occasion to the Indian tribes that the lands included in the contemplated Territories should be perpetually reserved for their...
Susan Sillers Darden, a white woman living in the Mississippi Delta region during the mid-nineteenth century, left behind a lengthy diary that covers many of the day-to-day occurrences and various happenings of her neighborhood. In an 1854 entry, Darden recounted a particularly unusual event: the exhumation of two corpses. Darden wrote that the remains of Rodney King and Mrs. Ogle were unearthed...
Governor Andrew Johnson's recommendation of a tax to support the creation of public schools in Tennessee was made law. The governor was a strong believer in mass education and forced his unenthusiastic legislature to pass the law. For the first time in its history, Tennessee had fully-operating public schools.<br />In Johnson's first message to the Assembly on December 19, 1853,...
On March 13, 1854 the Charleston Daily Courier ran a series of correspondences from Havana which reported on the escalating Black Warrior affair. These correspondences explain that on February 28 the ship Black Warrior stopped in Havana on its way from Mobile to New York as it had done numerous times in the past and upon arriving delivered its manifest to customs as was required. The captain listed...
A Virginia slave named Anthony Burns escaped from his master and made his way to Boston. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, his master had the right to recapture him and the ability to enlist local officials in his efforts. Burns was arrested in May on false burglary charges. Abolitionists tried every legal gambit they knew, but President Pierce and the U.S. attorney were determined to carry out the...
One criterion for personal enlightenment in Charleston during the 1850s was the acquisition of a personal library. Such a library could be large-Charlestonians Thomas Smyth and William Gilmore Simms owned 20,000 and 12,000 volumes, respectively, in the 1850s-or much smaller. Regardless, it was important to have the newest book on your shelf, a collection of the classics, or at least a few books...
Nineteen people in Nashville and the surrounding area died of what doctors suspected to be cholera. Most of the deaths occurred near the city limits. The Nashville Union sought to control any possible panic by relaying information of the epidemic with this concluding sentence: This is the whole truth up to this time [original emphasis]. They reassured their readers that once the weather changed...
The U.S. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act which organized the remaining territories from the Louisiana Purchase into the U.S. territories of Nebraska and Kansas. This legislation was created and passed by proponents of popular sovereignty, who thought that states should have the right to determine whether they would allow slavery. Because every five slaves counted as three votes in determining...
Officially called the American Party, the Know-Nothing political movement was spurred on by the influx of Irish Catholic immigrants into the United States in the 1840s, the greatest period of European migration ever seen so far. In 1854 immigrants formed a higher proportion of the total U.S. population than ever before or since that time. As the Whig Party disintegrated in the 1850s, separatists...