North Carolina Quakers, Anti-Slavery, and the Underground Railroad: 1830-1859

Date

General African American Timeline

Local Quaker & African American Timeline

1830

North Carolina emancipation law requires posting of $1,000   bond for each slave to be freed to require good behavior and   insurance that the freed slave would leave the state within    ninety days.

1831-1861

The Underground Railroad assists approximately 75,000 slaves to escape North and acquire freedom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

1831

Nat Turner Slave Insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia

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1831

William Lloyd Garrisons begins publishing The Liberator, in Boston. It propels him to prominence in the abolitionist movement as the weekly newspaper advocates the end of slavery. Garrison was also among the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society and active in the women's suffrage movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lloyd_Garrison

1831

Nat Turner's Rebellion is noted as the largest slave uprising in United States history. It occurred in Southampton County, Virginia. Between 55-65 whites were killed, and 100-200 blacks. The terror caused by this revolt lead to even stricter laws against assembly or education of slaves and free blacks throughout the South. Nat Turner was captured after two months of hiding and executed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner%27s_Rebellion

1832

 The phrase "Jim Crow" is first used by a white actor in blackface. This actor, Thomas D. Rice, performed a song-and-dance routine titled "Jump Jim Crow" that caricatured black performers. The term "Jim Crow Laws," which surfaces in the 1870s, is believed to have been derived from this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

1834

Henry Blair (1807–1860) receives a patent for his invention of a Seed-Planter used for the faster cultivation of corn. He is the second African American to be awarded a patent. The patent record states that he was a "colored man" and it was signed with an "x." He was illiterate. Blair received a second patent in 1836 for a cotton planter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blair_(inventor)

1837

New Garden Boarding School, later re-chartered to become Guilford   College, opens as a Quaker boarding school with fifty students (all European American as the school would not integrate to enroll African American students until 1962).

1837

English Quaker and abolitionist Joseph John Gurney visits North   Carolina and the new school at New Garden.

1838

Frederick Douglass escapes from slavery by boarding a train carrying false papers. Later, he changes his name from Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to what he became well known by. He would become a noted author, editor, orator, and abolitionist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass

1839

La Amistad ship is taken over by the slaves on broad. Then the captured navigator sailed the ship to Long Island instead of to their African homeland. In a famous Supreme Court case, the slaves are freed.

1840

An African American man named Gill is paid $34 to plant elm trees along North and South Streets in Greensboro by commissioners. The street would later be known as North and South Elm.

1841

1841 Creole, ship rebellion
(Off the Southern U.S. coast, Victorious)

1844

Virginia Yearly Meeting lay down, leaving North Carolina Yearly   Meeting as the only yearly meeting located in what would become    the Confederacy.  The few Friends remaining in Virginia are attached   to Baltimore Yearly Meeting.

1845

The autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is published.

1846

The Wilmot Proviso passes through Congress but fails to be passed by the Senate due to the strong Southern representation. It was introduced by David Wilmot, a Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, in an effort to ban slavery from the territory that was acquired after the Mexican War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmot_Proviso

1847

The North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper, is launched by Frederick Douglass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass

1849

Harriet Tubman escapes slavery in Maryland and goes to Philadelphia. She returns repeatedly to guide relatives out of slavery.  Later, she would become known as "Moses" because of her tireless efforts to bring others to freedom that included guiding escaped slaves to Canada when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed. She becomes an active "conductor" on the Underground Railroad. She recruited men for John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid. She was a Union army cook, nurse, scout and spy. And she worked in the women’s suffrage movement in New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

C:\Users\StudioR\Desktop\Illustrations for timeline\359px-Harriet_Tubman_by_Squyer,_NPG,_c1885.jpg

1850

The Compromise of 1850 admits California as a free state, prohibits the slave trade in Washington DC, and

An insurance policy of $800 is written for a slave named Felix and issued by the Greensboro Mutual Life Insurance and Trust Company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1850

1851

Sojourner Truth gives her "Ain't I a Woman" speech in Akron, Ohio. She is a former slave and forceful speaker in the abolition movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_Truth

1852

Uncle Tom's Cabin is published by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It has a powerful anti-slavery effect opposing that institution of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act. This national focus is a contributing factor to the Civil War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin

1854

 The Kansas-Nebraska Act is passed. It creates the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening it for settlement and to the development of routes for the Midwestern Transcontinental Railroad. In the process, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 is repealed. The Act, as proposal by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, stipulates that settlers in the new territories can determine whether they are slave states or free states by means of Popular Sovereignty, the vote. This results in a local civil war within Kansas as pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions flood into the state. It also upsets Northern abolitionist because the area had been recognized as non-slave territory since 1820.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas%E2%80%93Nebraska_Act

1856

Booker Taliaferro Washington is born on April 5 in Franklin County, Virginia. In 1881, he will become the first principal of Tuskegee Institute.

1857

 The Dred Scott case receives a ruling by the Supreme Court that states African Americans are not citizens in the United States, and further that Congress has no power to restrict slavery.

1858

The Wanderer discharges 409 surviving African slaves at Jekyll Island, Georgia on November 28, 1858. An investigation ensues from the Buchanan Administration that results in a report to Congress on December 3, 1860 stating that it is the last ship to arrive with slaves from Africa. This proves not to be accurate. The captain and crew are prosecuted and found not guilty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wanderer_(slave_ship)

1859

Harriet Wilson publishes the first novel written by an African American woman. This book is titled: Our Nig; Or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. It is republished much later by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Rev. Daniel Worth, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, is placed in Guilford County's jail for anti-slavery activity.

1859

John Brown leads an armed slave revolt in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. He is captured and hanged on a charge of treason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown%27s_raid_on_Harpers_Ferry

1859

The schooner Clotilde arrives in Mobile Bay, Alabama. It is the last slave ship to discharge slaves in the United States.
It was burned and scuttled in the Bay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotilde_(slave_ship)