A Treasury of Great American Scandals (38 page)

1830—
President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act, requiring eastern Indians to be resettled west of the Mississippi River. During the forced exodus that follows, known as “The Trail of Tears,” thousands die. “At this very moment a low sound of distant thunder fell on my ear,” a witness to the first drive later recalls. “In almost an exact western direction a dark spiral cloud was rising above the horizon and sent forth a murmur I almost fancied a voice of divine indignation for the wrongs of my poor and unhappy countrymen, driven by brutal power from all they loved and cherished in the land of their fathers, to gratify the cravings of avarice.”

1831—
Nat Turner, a black preacher in Virginia, leads a violent slave revolt in which fifty-four whites are killed. During the manhunt that follows, at least one hundred blacks are killed, while Turner and twenty others are later hanged.

1836—
Three thousand Mexican troops under Santa Anna storm the Alamo, a fortified mission in San Antonio, Texas. It is defended by 182 Texans and Tennessean Davy Crockett, under the command of Colonels William B. Travis and James Bowie. The garrison is overpowered within an hour and all the defenders killed.

1844—
On a test line of his telegraph between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Samuel F. B. Morse taps the famous line, “What hath God wrought!”

1845—
The Republic of Texas becomes the nation's twenty-eighth state.

1845—
Frederick Douglass's autobiography,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
is published.

1845—
Edgar Allan Poe's
The Raven
is published.

1846—
At the request of President Polk, Congress declares war on Mexico. The United States quickly defeats its weaker southern neighbor and gains a vast stretch of territory, from Texas west to the Pacific Ocean and north to Oregon.

1846—
Britain cedes the southern portion of its Oregon Territory below Vancouver to the United States.

1846—
After Joseph Smith is killed by a mob, Brigham Young leads a mass exodus of Mormons from Illinois to Utah.

1848—
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organize the first U.S. women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. The convention adopts a Declaration of Sentiments, which calls for women to receive “all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.” “The proceedings [of the convention] were extensively published, unsparingly ridiculed by the press, and denounced from the pulpit, much to the surprise and chagrin of the leaders,” the convention's organizers later write. “Being deeply in earnest, and believing their demands preeminently wise and just, they were wholly unprepared to find themselves the target for the jibes and jeers of the nation.”

1848—
James Marshall discovers gold at Sutter's Mill in California, triggering the greatest gold rush in American history.

1850—
The Compromise of 1850 temporarily simmers the growing strife over slavery by admitting California to the Union as a free state, and allowing the territories of New Mexico and Utah to decide the issue for themselves. The Compromise also abolishes the slave trade in the District of Columbia, while providing a stricter federal law for the return of runaway slaves.

1850—
Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter
is published.

1851—
Isaac Singer devises the first continuous-stitch sewing machine, the first major home appliance.

1851—
Herman Melville's
Moby-Dick
is published.

1852—
Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin
becomes a best-seller and further inflames the agitation over slavery. When Stowe is introduced to President Lincoln a decade later during the Civil War, he greets her with the question, “Is this the little woman whose book made such a great war?”

1854—
Congress passes the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing the people of the two territories to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery. President Franklin Pierce signs the bill into law, despite the fact that Kansas and Nebraska are in that part of the country where slavery had been “forever prohibited” under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The bitter and violent reaction to the new law offers a preview of the Civil War to come.

1854—
The Republican Party is formed in Ripon, Wisconsin, by antislavery groups opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

1854—
Henry David Thoreau's
Walden
is published.

1855—
Walt Whitman publishes at his own expense his first volume of poetry,
Leaves of Grass,
prompting one reviewer to call him “the dirtiest beast of his age.”

1857—
Elisha G. Otis installs the first passenger elevator, in New York City.

1857
—
Chief Justice Roger Taney delivers the infamous
Dred Scott
decision. Pages: 185-90.

1859—
The first commercially productive oil well is drilled near Titusville, Pennsylvania.

1860—
The Pony Express begins delivering mail from St. Louis, Missouri, then the western terminus of the American railroad system, to Sacramento, California. It closes the next year upon completion of the transcontinental telegraph.

1861—
Ten Southern states follow South Carolina out of the Union and form the Confederate States of America. The Civil War begins on April 12, when Southern troops fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

1862—
The Homestead Act grants free/cheap public land to frontier settlers.

1862—
The nation's first federal income tax is levied to help pay for the Civil War. It ends in 1872, but becomes a permanent fixture in American life in 1913.

1863—
President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, calling it “a fit and necessary war measure.” Although the Proclamation does not actually free a single slave (because it applies only to those areas under Confederate control), it does formally establish the abolition of slavery as a goal of the war, and strengthens the Northern war effort by providing for the incorporation of blacks into the Union army and navy.

1863—
In the greatest battle ever fought on the American continent, Union forces defeat invading Confederates at Gettysburg after three days. The decisive victory, occurring simultaneously with the Confederate surrender at Vicksburg, marks the turning point in the Civil War. Later that year, President Lincoln delivers his Gettysburg Address, declaring that the men who died on the battlefield gave their lives so “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

1863—
The U.S. Capitol dome is completed and capped with the Statue of Freedom.

1865—
General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army, surrenders to Union commander Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia on April 9. The last Confederate troops surrender a month later, ending the Civil War. The human cost of the four-year struggle is staggering, with approximately 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers losing their lives.

1865—
President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated in Washington, D.C., by Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.

1865—
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlaws slavery throughout the United States. It is followed in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment confirming the citizenship of blacks, and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which makes it illegal to deny voting rights based on race.

1866—
The transatlantic cable is completed.

1866—
The Ku Klux Klan is formed to terrorize liberated blacks in the South.

1867—
Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiates the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 (or about 2 cents per acre). Opponents of the purchase deride it as “Seward's Folly.”

1867—
Christopher Latham Sholes, with assistance from Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, make the first practical typewriter.

1868—
President Andrew Johnson, an opponent of harsh measures against the South during Reconstruction, is impeached in the U.S. House of Representatives due largely to the efforts of radical Republicans. He is acquitted in the Senate by one vote.

1868—
Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women
is published.

1869—
A silver sledge hammering a golden spike into a railroad tie at Promontory Point, Utah, marks the completion of the world's first transcontinental railroad. Built in just over three years by 20,000 workmen, it has 1,775 miles of track.

1870—
John D. Rockefeller founds Standard Oil.

1871—
The Great Fire of Chicago leaves over 100,000 people homeless and destroys 17,500 buildings. “Nobody could see it all,” Chicago
Tribune
editor Horace White later writes, “no more than one man could see the whole of the Battle of Gettysburg. It was too vast, too swift, too full of smoke, too full of danger, for anybody to see it all.”

1871—
Showman P. T. Barnum opens his circus, modestly dubbing it “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

1872—
In Rochester, New York, suffragist Susan B. Anthony illegally votes in the presidential election, and is arrested and fined. At her trial she declares, “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God,” which becomes a slogan of the suffragist movement.

1872—
Congress establishes Yellowstone as the first national park.

1875—
Congress passes a Civil Rights Act, giving blacks equal rights in public accommodations and access to jury duty. The U.S. Supreme Court declares the law unconstitutional in 1883.

1876—
Alexander Graham Bell transmits human speech for the first time while developing the telephone. His words are, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!” spoken to his assistant after spilling battery acid on himself. Bell demonstrates the telephone in Philadelphia as the United States celebrates its 100th birthday.

1876—
General George A. Custer and 264 soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry die in the “Last Stand” battle at the Little Bighorn River during the war with the Sioux Indians. “Where the last stand was made,” Sitting Bull later recalled, “the Long Hair [Custer] stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.”

1877—
Reconstruction officially ends when the last federal troops are withdrawn from the South.

1877—
The first commercial telephone line is installed in Massachusetts.

1878—
A woman suffrage amendment is first introduced in Congress. It fails to pass, but is reintroduced in every session of Congress for the next forty years.

1879—
Thomas Edison, “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” produces the first practical lightbulb. It his perhaps the greatest of his numerous accomplishments, including the invention of the phonograph and improvements to the telephone, telegraph, and motion pictures. “We sat and looked and the lamp continued to burn and the longer it burned the more fascinated we were,” Edison writes. “None of us could go to bed and there was no sleep for over forty hours; we sat and just watched it with anxiety growing into elation.”

1879—
California Electric Light Co. begins operating the world's first central power plant selling electricity to private customers.

1880—
New York streets are lit by electricity.

1881—
Clara Barton organizes the Red Cross.