1850: UNITED STATES. Seems like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and Article 4 Section 2 of the United States Constitution which mandates the return of escaped slaves to their "owners" just ain't doin' the job in the land of the free. So Congress passes a shiny, new Fugitive Slave Act to counter some difficulties in rounding up escaped slaves in some of the northern states. The new act imposes a legal duty on law enforcement officials throughout the United States to arrest anyone they suspect of being an escaped slave. The only evidence required to enforce the sending of a captured person to slavery was a sworn statement by the putative owner. Under the Act, the person said to be a slave had no right to a jury trial and was not permitted to testify on his or her own behalf. Professional slave catchers roamed throughout the U.S.
1850s-60s: UNITED STATES. Individually or as entire tribes, American Indians are kidnapped and bought and sold as slaves in
1850s-1862: UNITED STATES. The government of the United States repeatedly violates treaties it has made with the Dakota Indian nation and fails to make agreed payments. As hardship and hunger increase, the Dakota rise up against the whites occupying their land, which they had no right to do since the U.S. had abrograted the treaties.
President "Honest" Abe Lincoln isn't quite honest enough to ensure that the U.S. government honors legally binding treaties it has entered into and instead sends in the U.S. Army to complete the theft of native land. Eventually, more than a thousand Dakota are held in a concentration camp. Many are charged with various war crimes, a charge to which Lincoln's soldiers seem to have blanket immunity.
The native people then get a quick lesson in Truth, Justice Or The American Way. So-called trials are held, some lasting five minutes. The proceedings are not explained to the defendants and they are not represented by counsel.
On the day after Christmas, 1862, thirty eight Dakota, mainly holy men and political leaders are hung in the largest mass execution in American history.
1850-1884: UNITED STATES. William Avery Rockefeller, an upstate New York farmer descended from German immigrants named Roggenfelder, moves to Cleveland and, with true Rockefeller family integrity, lists himself in the city directory as a physician, "Doctor Levingston". Rockefeller then begins bottling crude petroleum and and selling it to the sick and dying as a cure for cancer named "Nujol". Rockefeller has a gift for deceiving the American public and finds it easy to con his unfortunate victims into shelling out cash for his fake cancer cure.
Aside from being a liar, con man and swindler, Rockefeller is indicted, although not convicted, for rape and flees when he is accused by neighbors of horse theft, burglary, arson and counterfeiting. Rockefeller marries a second wife while posing as Levingston and lives as a bigamist for thirty four years.
1851: JOHANN'S
1851: UNITED STATES. The Governor's plea does not go unheard and a posse assembled in Weaverville attacks an undefended village of the Wintu nation slaughtering between two and three hundred people.
1852-53:
1853:
1853-54:
1854:
1854:
1855:
1855: UNITED STATES. Famed Harvard physician and social commentator Oliver Wendell Holmes observes that Indians are nothing more than a "half-filled outline of humanity" whose "extermination" is necessary. Holmes describes native peoples as "a sketch in red crayons of a rudimental manhood," adding that it is only natural for the white man to "hate" the Indian and to "hunt him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image."
1855:
1855:
We will conquer the world,
but we will lose our souls.
John Quincy Adams
1856:
1856:
1856: UNITED STATES. The village of Lawrence, Kansas, founded by anti-slavery settlers and a center of pro-democracy activity, is sacked by a posse of 750 under Sheriff Samuel Jones. In the interests of furthering freedom of expression, two printing offices are gutted, the presses destroyed, and the all the lead type thrown in a river.
1857:
1857: UNITED STATES. In the infamous case of Dred Scott, a black man who had been bought by a U.S. Army officer, that great defender of liberty, the U.S. Supreme Court, courageously upholds slavery and, it its decision, says that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit." Just to drive the point home, the Court also points out that blacks, enslaved, freed or otherwise "were not and could never become citizens of the
"a subordinate and inferior class
of beings who had been subjugated
by the dominant race."
1858:
1858:
1858: UNITED STATES. Samuel Green, a minister of religion in Maryland, is sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
1858-59:
1859:
1859: UNITED STATES. Abolitionist John Brown who, unlike Abraham Lincoln, really was committed to freeing the slaves, and eighteen of his men, capture the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry with the hope of starting a rebellion of slaves in
Now, if it is deemed necessary
that I should forfeit my life
for the furtherance of the ends of justice,
and mingle my blood further
with the blood of my children
and with the blood of millions
in this slave country
whose rights are disregarded
by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,
I say, let it be done.
1859:
1859:
