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Civil War Timeline (1831 | Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1846 -1850 | The Wilmot…

- - - - 1852 | Uncle Tom’s Cabin
        
        Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional exploration of slave life was a cultural sensation. Northerners felt as if their eyes had been opened to the horrors of slavery, while Southerners protested that Stowe’s work was slanderous. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the second-best-selling book in America in the 19th century, second only to the Bible. Its popularity brought the issue of slavery to life for those few who remained unmoved after decades of legislative conflict and widened the division between North and South.
        
        1854 -1861 | Bleeding Kansas
        
        1857 | Dred Scott v. Sanford
        
        Dred Scott was a Virginia slave who tried to sue for his freedom in court. The case eventually rose to the level of the Supreme Court, where the justices found that, as a slave, Dred Scott was a piece of property that had none of the legal rights or recognition afforded to a human being. The Dred Scott Decision threatened to entirely recast the political landscape that had thus far managed to prevent civil war. The classification of slaves as mere property made the federal government’s authority to regulate the institution much more ambiguous. Southerners renewed their challenges to the agreed-upon territorial limitations on slavery and polarization intensified.
        
        1859 | John Brown’s Raid
        
        1860 | Abraham Lincoln’s Election
        
        1861 | The Battle of Fort Sumter
        
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        Abraham Lincoln was elected president, along with a republican congress. He was elected by a considerable margin in 1860 despite not being included on many Southern ballots. As a Republican, his party’s anti-slavery outlook struck fear into many Southerners. This infuriated southern Democrats who left Congress and took their states with them. They formed The Slaveholding Confederate States of America. Their followers were called “rebels.” Here’s their constitution. How does it differ from the U.S. Constitution (c. 1860)? On December 20, 1860, a little over a month after the polls closed, South Carolina seceded from the Union. Six more states followed by the spring of 1861.
        
        With secession, several federal forts, including Fort Sumter in South Carolina, suddenly became outposts in a foreign land. Abraham Lincoln made the decision to send fresh supplies to the beleaguered garrisons. On April 12, 1861, Confederate warships turned back the supply convoy to Fort Sumter and opened a 34-hour bombardment on the stronghold. The garrison surrendered on April 14.
        
        John Brown cut his teeth as a killer as an anti-slavery “Jayhawker” during Bleeding Kansas. In mid-October of 1859, the crusading abolitionist organized a small band of white allies and free blacks and raided a government arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He hoped to seize weapons and distribute them to Southern slaves in order to spark a wracking series of slave uprisings. Although Brown captured the arsenal, he was quickly surrounded and forced to surrender by soldiers under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. He was tried for treason and, upon his execution, became a martyr for the abolitionist cause. Southerners, on the other hand, began to militarize in preparation for future raids.
        
        The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, narrowly passed while Congressmen brandished weapons and uttered death threats in the House chambers, overturned parts of the Missouri Compromise by allowing the settlers in the two territories to determine whether or not to permit slavery by a popular vote. Pro- and anti-slavery agitators flocked to Kansas, hoping to shift the decision by sheer weight of numbers. The two factions struggled for five years with sporadic outbreaks of bloodshed that claimed fifty-six lives. Although both territories eventually ratified anti-slavery constitutions, the violence shocked and troubled the nation.