The Post-Colonial/Pre-Civil War Era 1780s – 1860 

1781: Twenty thousand black loyalists depart with British Troops from the newly independent United States. Approximately 5,000 black soldiers served with Patriot forces. Three times that many served with the British.

1784: Connecticut and Rhode Island adopt gradual emancipation laws.

1784: Congress rejects Thomas Jefferson's proposal to exclude slavery from all western territories after 1800.

1785: New York frees all slaves who served in the Revolutionary Army.

1785: The New York Society for the Promoting of the Manumission of Slaves is founded by prominent New Yorkers including John Jay and Alexander Hamilton.

1787: The U.S. Constitution is drafted. It provides for the continuation of the slave trade for another 20 years and required states to aid slaveholders in the recovery of fugitive slaves. The Three-Fifths Compromise was reached, it determined that three out of every five slaves were counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxation purposes.

1787: Richard Allen and Absalom Jones organized the Free African Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1787: The Continental Congress forbade slavery in the region northwest of the Ohio River by the Northwest Ordinance. This territory eventually became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota.

1787: Free blacks in New York City found the African Free School, where future leaders Henry Highland Garnett and Alexander Crummell are educated

1788: In Massachusetts, following an incident in which free blacks were kidnapped and transported to the state from the island of Martinique, the Massachusetts legislature declares the slave trade illegal and provides monetary damages to victims of kidnappings.

1790: Census of 1790 (First Census of the U.S. Population): Total population, 3,929,214, Black Population: 757,208 (19.3%) including 59,150 free African Americans.

1791: In February Major Andrew Ellicott hires Benjamin Banneker to assist in a survey of the boundaries of the 100-square-mile federal district that would later become the District of Columbia.

1792: Benjamin Banneker's Almanac is published in Philadelphia. It is the first book of science published by an African American.

1793: The United States Congress enacts the first Fugitive Slave Law. Aiding fugitive slaves is now a criminal offense.

1793: Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin in Georgia which he patents on March 13. The development of the cotton gin provides a major boost to the slave-based cotton economy of the South.

1794: Mother Bethel AME Church is established in Philadelphia by Richard Allen.

1794: New York adopts a gradual emancipation law

1795: Bowdoin College is founded in Maine. It later becomes a center for Abolitionist activity; Gen. Oliver O. Howard (Howard University) graduated from the college; Harriet Beecher Stowe taught there and began to write Uncle Tom's Cabin while there (in 1850)

1796: On August 23, The African Methodist Episcopal Church is organized in Philadelphia.

1798: Venture Smith's “A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa but Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America” appears as the first slave narrative written by the person in bondage. Earlier narratives were written by escaped enslaved people or by the emancipated.

1800: August 30, A slave revolt near Richmond, Virginia, led by Gabriel Prosser and Jack Bowley, was first postponed, and then betrayed. More than 40 blacks were eventually executed.

1800: The United States Congress rejects 85 to 1 an antislavery petition offered by free Philadelphia African Americans.

1800: Census of 1800, U.S. Population: 5,308,483, Black Population: 1,002,037 (18.9%) including 108,435 free African Americans.

1802: The Ohio Constitution outlaws slavery. It also prohibits free blacks from voting.

1802: James Callender claims that Thomas Jefferson has for many years past kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves, Sally Hemings. His charge was published in the Richmond Recorder that month, and the story is soon picked up by the Federalist press around the nation.

1803: On April 30, Louisiana is purchased from the French. The new territory nearly doubles the size of the United States

1804: Lemuel Haynes is the first African American to receive an honorary degree in U.S. history when Middlebury College awards him a master’s degree at its second commencement.

1804: In 1804 the Ohio legislature passes the Ohio Black Codes and in doing so becomes the first non-slaveholding state to place restrictions exclusively on its African American residents.

1804: The Lewis and Clark Expedition explores newly purchased Louisiana and the Pacific Northwest. A black man named York, is prominent in the expedition.

1807: New Jersey disfranchises black voters.

1808: The United States government abolishes the importation of enslaved Africans when it enacts the Slave Importation Ban. The ban, however, is widely ignored. Between 1808 and 1860, approximately 250,000 blacks are illegally imported into the United States.

1809: New York recognizes marriage within the African American community.

1810: Census of 1810, U.S. Population: 7,239,881, Black Population: 1,377,808 (19 percent) including 186,446 free African Americans.

1810: The U.S. Congress prohibits African Americans from carrying mail for the U.S. Postal Service.

1810: The African Insurance Company of Philadephia is the first black-owned insurance company in the United States

1811: Andry's Rebellion on January 8-11. A slave insurrection led by Charles Deslondes, begins on the Louisiana plantation of Manual Andry

1812: Previously independent African American schools become part of the Boston public school system

1812: Two African American regiments are formed in New York to fight in the War of 1812.

1814: Six hundred African American troops are among the U.S. Army of 3,000 led by General Andrew Jackson which defeats British forces at the Battle of New Orleans. The black troops were led by Major Joseph Savary, the highest-ranking black officer in the history of the United States to that point.

1815: Abolitionist Levi Coffin establishes the Underground Railroad in Indiana. Eventually it will spread across the North with routes originating in the South and stretching to British Canada.

1816: The American Colonization Society is founded by Bushrod Washington (the nephew of George Washington) and other prominent white Americans who believe enslaved blacks should be freed and settled in Africa.

1817: Francis Johnson of Philadelphia becomes the first black bandleader and composer to publish sheet music. In 1837 he becomes the first American to perform before Queen Victoria in England.

1817: Escaped enslaved people from Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama join the military campaign of the Florida Seminoles to keep their homelands.

1818: Connecticut disfranchises black voters.

1820: Census of 1820, U.S. Population: 9,638,452, Black Population: 1,771,656 (18.4 percent) including 233,504 free African Americans.

1820: The Compromise of 1820 allows Missouri into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. It also sets the boundary between slave and free territory in the West at the 36th parallel.

1821: New York maintains property qualifications for African American male voters while abolishing the same for white male voters. Missouri disfranchises free black male voters.

1821: Thomas Jennings of New York City became the first black American to receive a patent from the United States Government. His patent came because he developed a process for dry cleaning clothes.

1821: The African Grove Theater Group, the first black acting company, is founded in New York City

1822: Denmark Vesey is arrested for planning a slave rebellion in South Carolina.

1822: Rhode Island disenfranchises black voters

1823: The African Grove Theater performs The Drama of King Shotaway, the first play written by an African American, Wiliam Henry Brown.

1827: Freedom's Journal begins publication on March 16 in New York City as the first African American owned newspaper in the United States. The editors are John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish.

1827: Slavery is officially abolished in New York

1828: Theodore Sedgewick Wright is the first black graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary.

1829: More than half of Cincinnati's African American residents are driven out of the city by white mob violence. The Cincinnati riots usher in a more than century-long period of white violence against Northern black urban communities.

1829: David Walker of Boston publishes An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World which calls for a slave uprising in the South.

1829: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first permanent order of black Catholic nuns, is founded in Baltimore, Maryland.

1830: Census of 1830, U.S. Population: 12,866,020, Black Population: 2,328,842 (18.1 percent) including 319,599 free African Americans.

1830: African American delegates from New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia meet in Philadelphia in the first of a series of National Negro Conventions to devise ways to challenge slavery in the South and racial discrimination in the North.

1831: Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, killing at least 57 whites

1831: North Carolina enacts a statute that bans teaching slaves to read and write.

1831: Alabama makes it illegal for enslaved or free blacks to preach.

1831: William Lloyd Garrison of Boston founds The Liberator, the first abolitionist newspaper in the United States.

1831: Jarena Lee's “The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady”, was the first autobiography by an African American woman.

1832: Oberlin College is founded in Ohio. It admits African American men, black women, and white women. By 1860 one third of its students are black.

1832: The Female Anti-Slavery Society, the first African American women's abolitionist society, is founded in Salem, Massachusetts.

1832: The Georgia Infirmary, founded by white philanthropists in Savannah, is the first hospital in the United States dedicated to black patient care.

1833: The American Anti-Slavery Society is established in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1834: African Free Schools are incorporated into the New York Public School system.

1834: South Carolina bans the teaching of blacks, enslaved or free, in its borders.

1834: David Ruggles, abolitionist activist, opens the first African American bookstore in the nation, in New York City.

1836: Texas declares its independence from Mexico. In its Constitution as an independent nation, Texas recognizes slavery and makes it difficult for free blacks to remain there.

1836: The Gag Rule prohibits Congress from considering petitions regarding slavery

1837: The Institute for Colored Youth is founded in Southeastern Pennsylvania. It later became Cheyney University.

1837: The Philadelphia Vigilence Committee is organized to help fugitive slaves escape their pursuers.

1838: Pennsylvania disfranchises black voters.

1839: July, captives from the Mende tribe in Sierre Leone carried on the Spanish ship, La Amistad, took over the vessel killed most of the crew and attempted to sail back to Africa. However, the Spanish navigators whose life they spared betrayed them and led the ship into US waters of the coast of Long Island. The Africans were arrested and charged with piracy and murder. They eventually won their freedom in a case taken to the US Supreme Court, The United States v La Amistad

1840: Census of 1840, U.S. Population: 17,069,453, Black Population: 2,873,648 (16.1 percent) including 386,293 free African Americans.

1842: Frederick Douglass leads a successful campaign against Rhode Island's proposed Dorr Constitution which would continue the prohibition on black voting rights.

1842: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that states did not have to offer aid in the hunting or recapture of fugitive slaves within their borders.

1843: Rev. Henry Highland Garnet delivers his controversial "Address to the Slaves" at the National Negro Convention meeting in Buffalo, New York, which calls for a servile insurrection.

1843: Sojourner Truth and William Wells Brown begin their campaigns against slavery.

1844: On June 25, the Legislative Committee of the Provisional Government of Oregon enacts the first of a series of black exclusion laws.

1845: Texas is annexed to the United States.

1845: Frederick Douglass publishes his autobiography, “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass”

1845: Macon B. Allen of Worcester, Massachusetts is the first African American admitted to the bar in any state when he is allowed to practice law in Massachusetts.

1847: Frederick Douglass begins publication of The North Star in Rochester, New York.

1847: Missouri bans the education of free blacks.

1847: David Jones Peck is the first African American graduate of a U.S. medical school. He graduated from Rush Medical College in Chicago.

1848: On February 2 in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico cedes California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah and gives up claim to Texas at conclusion of The Mexican-American War in exchange for $20 million.

1849: The California Gold Rush begins. Eventually four thousand black Americans will migrate to California during this period.

1849: Harriett Tubman escapes from slavery and begins her efforts to rescue enslaved people.

1849: On December 4, Benjamin Roberts files a school desegregation lawsuit on behalf of his daughter, Sarah, who is denied admission to a Boston school. The lawsuit was unsuccessful.

1850: Census of 1850, U.S. Population: 23,191,876, Black Population: 3,638,808 (15.7 percent) including 433,807 free African Americans.

1850: The Compromise of 1850 revisits the issue of slavery. California enters the Union as a free state, but the territories of New Mexico and Utah are allowed to decide whether they will enter the Union as slave or free states. The 1850 Compromise also allowed southern slave catchers to come into northern free states and force citizens in those states to help them re-capture escaped enslaved people. 

1850: On August 27, Lucy Stanton of Cleveland completes the course requirements for Oberlin Collegiate Institute (now Oberlin College) and becomes the first African American woman to graduate from an American college or university.

1851: Sojourner Truth delivers her famous "Aren't I a Woman" speech at the Women's Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio on May 29.

1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which becomes a bestselling book and a major influence on the Anti-Slavery Movement.

1852: Martin R. Delany publishes The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States.

1852: The Jackson Street Hospital in Augusta, Georgia is established as the second medical facility dedicated solely to the care of black patients.

1853: Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (the Black Swan) debuts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and performs before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace a year later.

1853: William Wells Brown of Buffalo, New York, becomes the first African American novelist when he publishes “Clotel, or the President's Daughter”. The novel is published in England; however and thus he is not considered the first published black novelist in the United States.

1854: On May 24, Virginia fugitive slave Anthony Burns is captured in Boston and returned to slavery under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act. Fifty thousand Boston residents watched his transport through the streets of the city in shackles to a ship so that he could be returned to Virginia. A Boston Church eventually located Burns and raised the funds to purchase his freedom.

1854:  On May 30, the Kansas-Nebraska Act is passed by Congress. The Act repeals the Missouri Compromise and permits the admission of Kansas and Nebraska Territories to the Union after their populations decide on slavery.

1854: Bleeding Kansas is an outgrowth of the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Between 1854 and 1858 armed groups of pro and anti-slavery factions often funded and sponsored by organizations in the North and South, compete for control of Kansas Territory.

1854: The Republican Party is formed in Jackson, Michigan in the summer in opposition to the extension of slavery into the western territories.

1854: James A. Healy is ordained in France as the first black Jesuit priest. He becomes Bishop of Portland, Maine in 1875, a diocese that includes all of Maine and New Hampshire, and holds that post for 25 years.

1855: William C. Nell of Boston publishes “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution”, considered the first history of black Americans.

1855: Frederick Douglass is nominated by the Liberty Party of New York for the office of secretary of state. He is the first black candidate in any state to be nominated for a statewide office.

1856: Wilberforce University becomes the first school of higher learning owned and operated by black Americans. It is founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne becomes the institution's first president.

1857: On March 6, the Dred Scott Decision is handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

1858: Arkansas enslaves free blacks who refuse to leave the state.

1859: On October 16, John Brown leads twenty men, including five African Americans (John Copeland, Shields Green, Lewis S. Leary, Dangerfield Newby, and Osborne Anderson), in an unsuccessful attempt to seize the Federal Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia)

1859: Harriett Wilson of Milford, New Hampshire publishes “Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black”, the first novel by an African American woman.

1860: Census of 1860, U.S. Population: 31,443,321, Black Population: 4,441,830 (14.1 percent) including 488,070 free African Americans