User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Abolition of slavery timeline in North America

Selected timeline of events related to abolition of slavery in North America

May 14, 1772 One of the most significant milestones for abolitionists was the ruling by Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice - in favor of James Somerset or Somersett who had sued for his freedom from slavery. He had been purchased by Charles Stewart in Virginia in 1749 in Somerset v Stewart. When Somersett traveled with Stewart to England in 1769, he met Granville Sharp. In 1771 after a failed attempt to escape, Stewart put Somersett on a Jamaica-bound-ship to be sold. He was removed from the ship because his godparents had obtained a habeas corpus from the he King's Bench. Somersett was supported by British abolitionists and Stewart was supported by planters from the West Indies-based planters. Historians Alfred W. and Ruth G. Blumrosen suggest that this case increased support of the Southern colonies for independence from Britain, as they particularly wanted to protect slavery.

1807 British Empire. It was not until 1807 that Parliament

1831 "Fort Hill Address" Calhoun delivered the FHA as the Tariff affair unfolded in 1831, expressing "support for minority rights within a federal republic - that is Southern slave states - arguing that "slavery was a principal minority institution that needed portection as the economyindustrialized." As a Senator for North Carolina, from the 1830s until he died in 1850, Calhoun defended the institution of slavery warning that if "Southern interests were not protected, the Southern states would leave the Union."Bates

1833 the abolition of plantation slavery using transported Africans started in the Caribbean, Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius under Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

September 11, 1830 While the Nullification Crisis arose over a tariff law, it was recognized that the issues at stake had application to the slavery question as well. Calhoun wrote to Virgil Maxcy,

""I consider the tariff act as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick institution of the Southern States [i.e. slavery] and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriations in opposite relation to the majority of the Union, against the danger of which, if there be no protective power in the reserved rights of the states they must in the end be forced to rebel, or, submit it to have their paramount interests sacrificed, their domestick institutions subordinated by Colonization and other schemes, and themselves and children reduced to wretchedness. Thus situated, the denial of the right to the State to interpose constitutionally in the last resort, more alarms the thinking, than all the other causes."

— John C. Calhoun September 11, 1830

July 26, 1831 John C. Calhoun indicated that Nullification and interposition were interchangeable, stating:

"This right of interposition, thus solemnly asserted by the State of Virginia, be it called what it may — State-right, veto, nullification, or by any other name — I conceive to be the fundamental principle of our system."

— John C. Calhoun. The Fort Hill Address July 26, 1831

1835 Abolition movement began. Calhoun refers to it as the "agitation."

1835 A number of abolitionist petitions were put before the House of Representatives. Southern Congressmen proposed that all literature referring to slavery be censored. gag rule imposed by Southerners and their Northern Democrat counterparts put a gag rule in place - forbidding the discussion of slavery in Congress.

1830s - 1850 "intellectual architect of Nullification" "South’s recognized intellectual and political leader from the 1820s until his death in 1850." "He developed a two-point defense. One was a political theory that the rights of a minority section — in particular, the South — needed special protecting in the federal union. The second was an argument that presented slavery as an institution that benefited all involved." From a political theory perspective, he argued that the Southern slave states needed to be protected through federal recognition of States' rights in what he argued as minority rights he fought for federal support of slavery, arguing that the rights of those states that were in the minority - the states of the South - needed to be protected. His arguments laid the foundation for the eventual secession of the South from the Union.