The Routledge Companion to the American Civil War Era

Hugh Tulloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415229531
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134583485
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Arguably one of the most significant periods in US history, the American Civil War era continues to fascinate. In this essential reference guide to the period, Hugh Tulloch examines the war itself, alongside the political, constitutional, social, economic, literary and religious developments and trends that informed and were formed by the turbulent events that took place during America's nineteenth century.

Key themes examined here are:

• emancipation and the quest for racial justice
• abolitionism and debates regarding freedom versus slavery
• the confederacy and reconstruction
• civil war military strategy
• industry and agriculture
• Presidential elections and party politics
• cultural and intellectual developments.

Including a compendium of information through timelines, chronologies, bibliographies and guides to sources as well, students of American history and the civil war will want a copy of this by their side.

I
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

1619	First African Americans in Virginia.
1776, 4 July	Declaration of Independence.
1787	Constitution of the United States of America.
1787	North-West Ordinances: slavery banned from North-West territory.
1816	American Colonisation Society established.
1820	Missouri Compromise: prohibited slavery north of 36°30′ in territory of Louisiana Purchase.
1831, 1 January	First number of Garrison’s Liberator.
1831, 13–23 August	Nat Turner’s slave revolt, Southampton County, Virginia.
1831–32	Debates in Virginia legislature. Narrow defeat of emancipation and state black codes reinforced.
1832	South Carolina State Convention nullifies federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832.
1832, 5 December	Jackson re-elected president.
1832, 10 December	Jackson issues a proclamation to people of South Carolina against nullification.
1833	Oberlin, America’s first co-educational college, established and, under Theodore Weld, became centre of north-west abolitionism; American Antislavery Society established in Philadelphia; slavery and slave trade ended in British Empire.
1834	Prudence Crandall’s school for African American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, closed by vandalism.
1835, 21 October	Mob attacks female Antislavery Society meeting in Boston, and Garrison is nearly killed.
1836, March	Texas declares independence from Mexico.
1836, 11 March	A ‘gag rule’ introduced in Congress barring discussion of anti-slavery petitions (repealed 1844).
1837, May	Economic panic and depression; Martin Van Buren 8th President of the United States.
1837, 7 November	Abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, murdered by mob in Alton, Illinois; Emerson’s address at Harvard, ‘The American Scholar’, declaring American literary independence from Europe.
1838	Joshua Giddings (Ohio, Whig) first abolitionist in Congress; first American edition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
1839	Theodore Weld’s Slavery as It Is; Armistad slave mutiny.
1840	Harrison’s ‘Log cabin and hard cider’ campaign; World Antislavery Convention held in London, and women denied seating on floor of hall; Liberty Party organised and nominated James Birney as presidential candidate.
1841	William Henry Harrison 9th President of the United States.
1841, 4 April	John Tyler (previously Vice President) becomes 10th President of the United States; Brook Farm, utopian communal experiment, established in Massachusetts by George Ripley.
1842	Prigg v. Pennsylvania.
1843	Baptist church split over slavery.
1844	James Polk stands on platform of annexation of Texas and acquisition of Oregon territory.
1845, December	Texas admitted as 28th state and 15th slave state; Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave.
1846, 13 May	Congress declares war on Mexico.
1846, 15 June	Settlement of Oregon boundary at the 49th Parallel.
1846, June	Frémont leads Bear Flag revolt in California against Mexico; David Wilmot (Pennsylvania, Democrat) Proviso excluding slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico fails in Senate.
1847, 23 February	General Zachary Taylor defeats Mexicans at Buena Vista.
1847, 14 September	Winfield Scott captures Mexico City.
1848, 24 January	Gold discovered at Sutter’s Mill, California. Start of California Gold Rush.
1848, 2 February	Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico.
1848, 19–20 July	First female rights’ convention held at Seneca Falls, New York State; Free Soil Party established with Martin Van Buren as presidential candidate.
1848	Zachary Taylor elected 12th President of the United States.
1849	Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government.
1850, 9 July	Death of Taylor. Vice President Millard Fillmore becomes 13th President of the United States.
1850, 9 September	California established as 31st and free state. Great Compromise of 1850.
1851	Melville, Moby Dick.
1852	Publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
1853	Franklin Pierce 14th President of the United States.
1853, July	Commodore Matthew Perry’s mission to Japan.
1854	Kansas–Nebraska Act repeals Missouri Compromise.
1854, 28 February	Founding of Republican Party in Ripon, Wisconsin; Thoreau, Walden or Life In The Woods; George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South.
1855	Civil war in ‘Bleeding Kansas’.
1855, 28 April	Massachusetts bans segregation in education; Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
1856	John Brown and 7 followers massacre 5 pro-slavers at Pottawatomie Creek; Sumner’s ‘Crime against Kansas’ speech, followed by assault upon him in Senate two days later.
1857	Buchanan 15th President of the United States.
1857, November	Buchanan accepts pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas. Douglas rejects it. Democratic split.
1858, 16 June	Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ speech at Illinois Republican state convention.
1858, 21 August–15 October	Lincoln–Douglas Debates in Illinois; Seward’s ‘Irrepressible Conflict’ speech at Rochester.
1859, 16 October	John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Executed 2 December.
1860, 6 November	Lincoln elected 16th President of the United States.
1860, 20 December	South Carolina secedes, followed rapidly by 6 other slave states.
1860, 31 December	Crittenden Amendment rejected by Senate Committee.
1861, 8 February	...

Table of contents

• Routledge Companions to History
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF MAPS, TABLES AND FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
• PART II DOCUMENTS AND RESOURCES
• PART III BIOGRAPHIES, GLOSSARY AND REFERENCES
• INDEX