The Stono Rebellion, one of the earliest slave insurrections, leads to the deaths of at least 20 whites and more than 40 blacks west of Charleston in the black-majority colony of South Carolina.
1746
Lucy Terry composes the poem "Bars Fight," the earliest extant poem by an African-American. Transmitted orally for more than 100 years, it first appears in print in 1855.
1770
Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave, is killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. He is one of the first men to die in the cause of American independence.
1772
Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable builds a fur-trading post on the Chicago River at Lake Michigan. Its success leads to the settlement that later becomes the city of Chicago.
1773
Phillis Wheatley, the first notable black woman poet in the United States, is acclaimed in Europe and America following publication in England of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
1790
Benjamin Banneker, mathematician and compiler of almanacs, is appointed by President George Washington to the District of Columbia Commission, where he works on the survey of Washington, D.C.
1793
Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Act, making it a crime to harbour an escaped slave or to interfere with his or her arrest.
1796
Richard Allen becomes the first ordained black minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church. 1800
Gabriel (Prosser) plans the first major slave rebellion in U.S. history, massing more than 1,000 armed slaves near Richmond, Va. Following the failed revolt, 35 slaves, including Gabriel, are hanged.
1820
The Missouri Compromise provides for Missouri to be admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and western territories north of Missouri's southern border to be free soil.
1821
The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is organized, developing from a congregation of blacks who left the John Street Methodist Church in New York City because of discrimination.
1822
Freedman Denmark Vesey plans the most extensive slave revolt in U.S. history. The Charleston rebellion is betrayed before the plan can be effected, leading to the hanging of Vesey and 34 others.
1829
Abolitionist David Walker publishes a pamphlet entitled Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World . . . , calling for a slave revolt. Radical for the time, it is accepted by a small minority of Abolitionists.
1831
William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing the antislavery newspaper The Liberator, advocating emancipation for black Americans held in bondage.
1831
Nat Turner leads the only effective, sustained slave rebellion in U.S. history, attracting up to 75 fellow slaves and killing 60 whites. After the defeat of the insurrection, Turner is hanged on November 11.
1839 Slaves revolt on the Spanish slave ship Amistad in the Caribbean. After their arrest in Long Island Sound, former U.S. president John Quincy Adams successfully defends the rebels before the Supreme Court.
1843
In a speech at the national convention of free people of colour, Henry Highland Garnet, Abolitionist and clergyman, calls upon slaves to murder their masters.
1847
Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the son of free blacks in Virginia, is elected the first president of Liberia. In 1849 he secures British recognition of Liberia as a sovereign nation.
1847
Frederick Douglass begins publication of the North Star, an antislavery newspaper, contributing to his break with white Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator.
1850
Speaking on behalf of the Abolitionist movement, Sojourner Truth travels throughout the Midwest, developing a reputation for personal magnetism and drawing large crowds.
1853
William Wells Brown--a former slave, Abolitionist, historian, and physician--publishes Clotel, the first novel by a black American.
1855
John Mercer Langston, a former slave, is elected clerk of Brownhelm Township in Ohio. He is the first black to win an elective political office in the United States.
1856
Members of the Methodist Episcopal Church found Wilberforce University. After the university is closed during the Civil War, it is bought and reopened by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
1856
In the ongoing contest between pro- and antislavery forces in Kansas, a mob sacks the town of Lawrence, a "hotbed of abolitionism," leading to retaliation by John Brown at Pottawatomie Creek.
1857
In its Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court legalizes slavery in all the territories, exacerbating the sectional controversy and pushing the nation toward civil war.
1859
Harriet E. Wilson writes Our Nig, a largely autobiographical novel about racism in the North before the Civil War.
1861
The Civil War begins in Charleston, S.C., as the Confederates open fire on Fort Sumter.
1861
Pinckney Pinchback runs the Confederate blockade on the Mississippi to reach New Orleans. There he recruits a company of black volunteers for the Union, the Corps d'Afrique.
1862
Future U.S. congressman Robert Smalls and 12 other slaves seize control of a Confederate armed frigate in Charleston harbour. They turn it over to a Union naval squadron blockading the city.
1862
The second Confiscation Act is passed, stating that slaves of civilian and military Confederate officials "shall be forever free," enforceable only in areas of the South occupied by the Union Army.