This painting, “Columbus Taking Possession,” by an unknown artist, glorifies the exploits of Italian explorer and enslaver Christopher Columbus who generations of U.S. school students were erroneously taught “discovered” America.

The image was first published in 1893 by Prang Educational Company of Boston, Massachusetts. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The U.S. Supreme Court legitimizes the theft and control by European occupiers of Indigenous lands in the U.S. by adopting into law the Christian Doctrine of Discovery.

Originating in the Catholic Church, the doctrine is first articulated in two papal bulls – the first in 1452 by Pope Nicholas V, and the second by his successor, Pope Alexander VI, in 1493. These edicts essentially assert that Christian nations have a right, sanctioned by God, to take non-Christian lands and property and assert political control over the Indigenous inhabitants.

For example, the 1452 edict grants the king of Portugal the Pope’s blessing to go to the west coast of Africa and “capture, vanquish and subdue the Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ, and put them in perpetual slavery and to take all their possessions and their property.”

Over the next several centuries, these papal documents are frequently used by Christian European conquerors in the Americas to justify a brutal system of colonization that dehumanizes Indigenous people. It is a system that regards their territories as being inhabited only by “brute animals,” in the words of Massachusetts-born Joseph Story, a renowned constitutional scholar and a Supreme Court justice between 1811 and 1829.

The Doctrine of Discovery forms the basis of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the landmark 1823 case of Johnson v. McIntosh. It is the first of three court cases that become the foundation of “Indian law” in the U.S.

The case involves a dispute over the ownership of land originally traded to settlers by Illinois and Piankeshaw people in the 1770s in what is now the state of Illinois. As part of its decision, the court declares that the Indigenous people have only a “right of occupancy” and cannot own the land. This ruling – and two others in 1831 and 1832 – affirm the principle that ownership of land lies with those who “discover” it (i.e., European settlers), ignoring the fact that Indigenous people had been stewards of their ancestral territories for millenia. (The Native American concept of land "ownership" differs significantly from that of Europeans. The Earth is understood by Native Americans as a living, sentient being, and, therefore, no human can claim to own any of it.)

In his book, Five Hundred Years of Injustice: The Legacy of Fifteenth Century Religious Prejudice, Native American scholar Steve Newcomb gives examples of how the U.S. government uses the Supreme Court’s Discovery Doctrine decisions “to callously disregard the human rights of Native peoples.” According to Newcomb, the government draws on those decisions to:

Circumvent the terms of solemn treaties that the U.S. entered into with Indian nations;
Steal the homelands of Native peoples living east of the Mississippi River by removing them from their traditional ancestral lands under the Indian Removal Act of 1835;
Divest Native people of some 90 million acres of their lands through the General Allotment Act of 1887. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs at the time explains that the law is “an indirect method” of peacefully “taking away the land that we were determined to take away but did not want to take openly by breaking the treaties.”
Steal the sacred Black Hills in present-day South Dakota from the Great Sioux Nation in violation of an 1868 treaty that recognized the Sioux Nation’s “exclusive and absolute possession of their lands.”

In March 2023, in response to decades of Indigenous demands, the Vatican formally repudiates the Doctrine of Discovery. It declares that the papal edicts that undergird it “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples” and had never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.

1825 March Haynes: Freedom guide, key Union spy

Union spy and Underground Railroad conductor March Haynes, who guides numerous enslaved people to freedom during the Civil War, is born into slavery into Pocotaligo, South Carolina.

Little is known about Haynes’ early life, but records indicate that he is elected a church deacon in 1849 and nine years later is brought by his then-enslaver to Savannah, Georgia. There he becomes the “property” of John C. Rowland, a cotton warehouseman and shipper.

Rowland “hires out” Haynes as a boat pilot and stevedore, loading and unloading goods off ships. (The practice of hiring out enslaved people to other White business owners is common in Savannah and elsewhere as a way for enslavers to maximize their profits.) Working as a boat pilot, Haynes gains valuable knowledge of the marshes and waterways of the Savannah River watershed.

In 1861, John Rowland enlists in the Confederate service and is assigned to Fort Pulaski, located on the edge of the Savannah River. Haynes accompanies him there and is conscripted as a carpenter.

In 1863, after the reputedly impregnable fort falls to Union forces following a 112-day siege, Rowland becomes a prisoner of war and Haynes becomes a free man. Under federal law, Haynes and others who had been previously enslaved in Confederate-held territory are automatically emancipated.

March Haynes immediately takes advantage of his newfound freedom to help others gain theirs. Like Harriet Tubman, he becomes a top conductor of the Underground Railroad in South Carolina’s coastal Lowcountry.

Using a boat that he keeps hidden in the marshes, and which is painted a suitably drab color for camouflage, Haynes draws on his extensive knowledge of local waterways to carry scores – perhaps hundreds – of enslaved people to freedom in Union-held territory. When his activities arouse White suspicions, Haynes leaves Savannah with his wife and settles her in Union-occupied Hilton Head, South Carolina.

This picture of March Haynes appears in "The History of the First African Baptist Church," 1888, by Emanuel King Love. Haynes was a deacon at the church in Savannah, Georgia. Source: Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

But Haynes is also determined to directly serve the Union cause, and he enlists in the U.S. Army as part of the The United States Colored Troops, which comprises regiments of African American and Native American soldiers. While continuing to shepherd escapees from slavery to freedom, he serves as a Union spy, making periodic forays behind enemy lines to gather critical intelligence about Confederate forces.

Landing in the marshes below Savannah, he enters the city at night and, sheltered and supplied by trusted allies in the Black community, spends days discretely examining Confederate forts, batteries, and camps, and bringing away precise and valuable information. On one expedition, he and his companions encounter six Confederate soldiers. In the ensuing firefight, Haynes kills three of them; he himself is wounded but manages to escape capture. He is hospitalized, and never returns to active duty.

After the war, March Haynes returns to Savannah and resumes his position as deacon at his beloved First African Baptist Church in 1877. He dies on July 16, 1899.

1826 New group fosters Black abolitionist movement

Notice of a meeting of the Massachusetts General Colored Association published in the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. Source: Wikipedia.

The Massachusetts General Colored Association is established in Boston to combat slavery and racism.

Formed to “promote the welfare of the race by working for the destruction of slavery,” the MGCA is the country’s first Black abolitionist organization.

Founding members include Thomas Dalton, William Cooper Nell, James George Barbadoes, Walker Lewis, John Scarlett, John T. Hilton, and David Walker. The charismatic and influential Walker, who will go on to publish his seminal abolitionist tract, Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, is a driving force in the MGCA.

The MGCA fosters the creation of Black urban activist networks and lays the foundation for a broad-based Black abolitionist movement. As an early supporter of the White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his newspaper, The Liberator, the MGCA plays a key role in forging an alliance between Black and White activists that is critical to the growth of Northern abolitionism.

In 1833, the MGCA becomes an auxiliary of the previously all-White New England Anti-Slavery Society. Together, they organize anti-slavery conventions and speaking programs throughout New England.

1826 John Greenleaf Whittier: Abolitionist poet, editor

The first published poem by abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier appears in a Newburyport, Massachusetts newspaper. The paper is edited by William Lloyd Garrison, who will soon emerge as a leading force in the abolitionist movement.

A Quaker, Whittier produces two collections of anti-slavery poetry in his lifetime, Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States, between 1830 and 1838, and Voices of Freedom.

Encouraged by Garrison, Whittier joins the abolitionist cause, and publishes the controversial anti-slavery pamphlet, Justice and Expediency, in which he echoes Garrison and Black abolitionists leaders like David Walker in calling for immediate emancipation for all enslaved people.

A founding and active member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Whittier becomes the editor of The National Era, one of the most influential abolitionist newspapers in the North published by journalist Gamaliel Bailey. For 10 years, it features the best of Whittier’s prose and poetry. Whittier serves as poet laureate for the Liberty Party, which he joins in 1839.

Whittier is one of a number of abolitionists – Black and White – whose poetry and perspectives inspire and enrich the abolitionist cause.

Prominent African American poets include Phillis Wheatley Peters, who arrives in Boston from West Africa as a child on a slave ship in 1761, achieves fame in Europe and the U.S. for her poetry, and is widely regarded as the mother of African American literature; George Moses Horton, dubbed the “Colored Bard of North Carolina," who is born into slavery on a tobacco plantation in 1798; and free-born Frances Ellen Watkins Harper who is also a dedicated political activist involved with the abolitionist, women’s rights, and temperance movements in the 1850s and beyond.

In addition to Whittier, other White abolitionists who make their mark in verse include Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist and philosopher; Louisa May Alcott, best known for her semi-autobiographical Little Women stories; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist, philosopher, and leader of the transcendentalist movement.

John Greenleaf Whittier, 1881, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Photograph by William Notman.

1827 Freedom's Journal: The voice of Black abolitionism

The first issue of Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827. Source: Library of Congress.

Freedom’s Journal, the first African American abolitionist newspaper, begins publication in New York City.

It is founded by the Rev. John Wilk, the Rev. Peter Williams, Jr., William Hamilton, and other leading free Black leaders and abolitionists in the city.

Edited by community activists Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, the paper is dedicated to African American emancipation, education, and citizenship (the right to vote). It supports the abolition of slavery by federal law or constitutional amendment.

Editorials deriding slavery, racial discrimination, and other injustices against African Americans provide a counterweight to the many local White newspapers that support slavery and are openly racist, in part because the economy of New York state is strongly intertwined with the South and slavery: in 1822, products from upstate textile mills that use Southern plantation cotton account for half the state’s exports.

Freedom’s Journal creates a forum for African Americans to express their views and advocate for their causes. Russwurm and Cornish place great value on the need for reading and writing as keys to empowerment for the Black population, and they hope that a Black newspaper will encourage literacy and intellectual development among African Americans.

The paper is also aimed at broadening readers’ awareness of world events and developments, and strengthening ties among Black communities across the Northern U.S. Subscriptions are $3 per year. At its peak, Freedom’s Journal circulates in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada. Agents employed to sell subscriptions include Black abolitionist leader David Walker in Boston.

In September 1827, Russwurm becomes sole editor of the paper after Cornish resigns due to differences over colonization – the controversial proposal to resettle free African Americans in the newly established U.S. colony of Liberia in West Africa. Russwurm has begun to promote the colonization movement, but it is unpopular with the paper’s readers and subscriptions begin to decline.

Loss of circulation forces Freedom’s Journal to cease publication in 1829. Samuel Cornish attempts to revive the paper under a new name, The Rights of All, but it folds in less than a year.

Although it is only published for two years, Freedom’s Journal breaks new ground and makes a significant impact on antebellum African American communities. By the beginning of the Civil War three decades later, there are over 40 Black-owned and operated newspapers in the United States.

1827 Boycott of goods made by enslaved labor grows

The movement to boycott all goods produced by enslaved labor in favor of alternatives made by free paid workers broadens with the formation in Philadelphia by radical Quakers of the Free Produce Society.

Prominent in the movement is abolitionist and women’s rights activist Lucretia Mott. She and her husband, James Mott, abstain from buying or wearing cotton, and go out of their way to buy staples like rice, coffee, and tea, and nonfood items like tobacco and indigo dye, from sources besides the U.S. South or the Caribbean.

Lucretia Mott is known for giving out maple candies wrapped in papers that bear messages like, “Take this, my friend, you need not fear to eat. No slave hath toiled to cultivate this sweet.”

Abolition teapot by Joshua Wedgwood & Sons, circa 1760. Source: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, U.K.

1829 Protests fail to stop expulsion of Native peoples

Major Ridge (c.1771–1839), also known as Nunnehidihi, and later Ganundalegi, was a Cherokee leader, a member of the tribal council, and a lawmaker. As a warrior, he fought in the Cherokee–American wars against American frontiersmen.

Later, Major Ridge led the Cherokee in alliance with the U.S. in the Creek and Seminole wars of the early 19th century. Source: Wikipedia.

Abolitionists and others protest the proposed removal by the U.S. government of Indigenous tribes in the southeast from their ancestral homelands.

A systematic federal effort to displace the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole as autonomous nations is already underway. The new U.S. president, Andrew Jackson, seeks to pass a law, the Indian Removal Act, to legitimize political and military action to compel the tribes to resettle west of the Mississippi River.

A national, interracial movement – Native, Black, and White – that includes abolitionists emerges to stop the federal removal policy. They hold meetings, publish pamphlets, collect donations, and circulate petitions. Unfortunately, their efforts are in vain.

Implemented in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling, the Indian Removal Act paves the way for the forced expulsion of as many as 100,000 Native Americans from their homelands into the West. Thousands die of exposure, disease, and starvation before or after they reach their new government-designated reservations in “Indian Territory” (present-day Oklahoma.)

Through their participation in the anti-removal movement, abolitionists are confirmed in their belief that cotton planters and other enslavers who covet Native land are responsible for Indian expulsion, and that Southerners are using the federal government to expand and protect slavery.

The debate over Indian removal helps Black abolitionists strengthen their case against colonization, the controversial proposal to deport free African Americans to Liberia, a new U.S. colony in West Africa. In 1831, at a meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, the abolitionists call attention to the “anti-christian and inconsistent conduct of those who so strenuously advocate our removal” to Africa, while they simultaneously “contend against the cruelty and injustice of Georgia in her attempt to remove the Cherokee Indians west of the Mississippi.”

1829-1830 Pro-slavery mobs devastate Black Ohio communities

Pro-slavery mobs rampage through Cincinnati, Ohio, burning Black homes, businesses, churches, and schools.

The riot prompts a mass exodus of nearly 2,000 African Americans from the city. Some settle elsewhere in the U.S. while others move to towns in Ontario, Canada that are home to other formerly enslaved African Americans. A small group founds a colony in Canada – later named Wilberforce in honor of prominent British abolitionist William Wilberforce – where they farm for a living and establish their own schools and churches.

The violence in Cincinnati is rooted in racism and exacerbated by competition for jobs. Increasing numbers of African Americans who have escaped slavery in the South come to Cincinnati hoping to find safety and economic opportunity. Many are impoverished and live in makeshift shelters along the riverfronts in order to survive. There they compete for wage labor jobs with low-income Whites, especially Irish immigrants.

Poster of the Cincinnati riot of 1884. Source: Cincinnati Views website.

To curb the influx of future migrants, city leaders invoke, and begin enforcing, the Black Act of 1807, a state law aimed at limiting African American migration into Ohio. It requires that new Black residents provide a $500 bond guaranteeing their solvency and economic self-sufficiency – an impossible barrier for the vast majority.

Cincinnati has a long history of riots, many fueled by racism. It is part of an unrelenting plague of anti-Black violence that echoes the violence of slavery: In the 19th century alone, more than 40 race riots take place in communities across the country. That number grows significantly in the first decades of the 20th century. In the infamous “Red Summer” of 1919 alone, African Americans are targeted – and over 50 are killed – in some 60 White supremacist terrorist attacks and race riots in more than three dozen cities.

The violence is not confined to urban areas. That same year, in rural Elaine County, Arkansas, White mobs aided by federal troops and terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan kill between 100 and 240 Black residents in what comes to be known as the Elaine Massacre. State officials concoct an elaborate and successful cover-up, falsely claiming that Black residents planned an insurrection. More than 100 African Americans are indicted, and 12 are sentenced to death by electrocution. They are acquitted after a years-long legal battle led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP.)

1829 Walker's Appeal: A rallying cry for Black Americans

David Walker's Appeal. Source: Library of Congress. Read it here.

Black abolitionist David Walker publishes his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in Boston, Massachusetts.

The pamphlet is an impassioned rallying cry for African Americans to resist slavery, educate themselves, and unite against oppression.

It also calls out White Christians for their hypocrisy in supporting slavery, and for the racism inherent in such proposed “reforms” as sending free African Americans “back to Africa” in a colonization scheme.

An evangelical Christian born free in North Carolina, the charismatic Walker settles in Boston in 1825 where he quickly emerges as a prominent leader in the vibrant African American community on Beacon Hill.

Active with many civic organizations – he is a co-founder of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, the country's first Black abolitionist organization – Walker also serves as a sales agent and writer for the influential New York-based Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans in the U.S.

Walker organizes circulation of his Appeal throughout the South via clandestine networks of friends, allies, and sympathizers. He often uses the regular mail – for example, he sends 60 copies, apparently unsolicited, to Henry Cunningham, a prominent preacher with the African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia – but he is also creative in his distribution methods: he stitches copies into the lining of coats he sells to southbound Black sailors who are customers at his Boston clothing store.

Walker and his associates also use sympathetic White sailors as couriers because they arouse the least suspicion when smuggling the pamphlets ashore at Southern ports. At least one White sailor, Edward Smith, is caught with copies of the Appeal in his possession, in Charleston, South Carolina. He is fined $1,000 and sentenced to a year’s hard labor.

Alarmed by the Appeal, and fearing its potential to incite slave revolts, Southern authorities do everything they can to suppress it. Officials destroy copies wherever they find them, deal brutally with those discovered to be carrying the pamphlet, and pass new and stricter laws against anti-slavery material and against the education of the enslaved. Louisiana makes it a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death to “write, print, publish, or distribute any thing having a tendency to create discontent among the free coloured population of this state, or insubordination among the slaves therein.”

Walker himself becomes a target: The governor of Georgia, George Gilmer, promises a reward of $10,000 for his capture.

Gilmer and other officials, including Virginia governor William Branch Giles, and the mayor of Savannah, Georgia, also seek the cooperation of Boston mayor Harrison Gray Otis to stem the flow of the Appeal into their states. (As one indication of the volume, Jacob Cowan, an enslaved man arrested in the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, had received over 200 copies.) But Mayor Otis responds that “we have no power to control the purpose of the author, and without it, we think that any public notice of him or his book would make matters worse.”

The impact of the Appeal is not confined to the South. A story in the Boston Evening Transcript of September 28, 1830 describes the enthusiastic response from “our colored population.” They “gloried in its principles as if it were a star in the east, guiding them to freedom and emancipation.” The Rev. Amos Beman, a prominent Black abolitionist in Middletown, Connecticut, recalls how members of his community would gather to hear the Appeal and other anti-slavery works. They were “read and re-read until their words were stamped in letters of fire upon our soul.”

The Appeal is not known to have directly generated any rebellions among the enslaved, although a Boston friend of Walker’s claims it helps trigger an 1831 revolt in New Bern, North Carolina, in which 60 enslaved people lose their lives. But the fiery treatise serves to rally, inspire, and strengthen those engaged in the struggle for freedom.

Historian Peter P. Hinks, author of To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance, considers Walker’s Appeal to be "one of the most neglected yet most important political and social documents of the nineteenth century."

Its impacts have been far-reaching:

The Appeal has a profound effect on the national debate about slavery. In its pages, Walker decries the unique savagery and unchristian nature of slavery with a bluntness and passion never heard before. Historian Herbert Aptheker, author of One Continual Cry: David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829-1830), Its Setting & Its Meaning writes: “Walker’s Appeal is the first sustained written assault upon slavery and racism to come from a black man in the United States. This was the main source of its overwhelming power in its own time….Never before or since was there a more passionate denunciation of the hypocrisy of the nation as a whole – democratic and fraternal and equalitarian and all the other words. And Walker does this not as one who hates the country but rather as one who hates the institutions which disfigure it and make it a hissing in the world.”

In the Appeal, Walker challenges the thinking behind the growing anti-Black sentiment of the 1820s. This is expressed in a proposal by the government-backed American Colonization Society (ACS) to transport free Black Americans to a new colony or colonies in Africa. According to ACS supporters and apologists, Black people are inferior to White people, and they pose a threat to the future of the new American democracy. This idea – and the racism at the heart of it – is encouraged and justified by Thomas Jefferson. The former president writes that Blacks “must be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” Walker takes on Jefferson and his arguments directly in the Appeal.

The Appeal pushes the abolitionist movement in a more radical direction. In 1830, when the Appeal is published, more than 50 Black abolitionist organizations already exist across the country. And David Walker’s call for the immediate abolition of slavery resonates strongly with many Black people. The Appeal also influences the thinking of leading White abolitionists who launch anti-slavery organizations in the 1830s. They include William Lloyd Garrison, a journalist who co-publishes The Liberator, an influential abolitionist weekly newspaper in Boston. Garrison has advocated a more gradual approach to ending slavery. But he becomes convinced that Walker is right in his demand for immediate emancipation (although he disagrees with him about how to achieve it). In the early issues of his newspaper, Garrison devotes substantial space to discussions of the Appeal.
The Appeal inspires and influences generations of Black leaders and activists of all backgrounds. It continues to strike a chord today in relation to the ongoing struggle for racial justice. Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, liberation theologians, and many more have respectfully followed in David Walker’s footsteps. Echoes of Walker’s Appeal can be heard most vividly, for example, in Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.”

Note: There is no known image of David Walker. A photo purporting to be of Walker that has circulated on the Internet is, in fact, of James W.C. Pennington, a formerly enslaved abolitionist, minister, orator, and writer.

1830 Black groups expand free produce movement

The Quaker-initiated movement to boycott goods produced by enslaved people and promote free labor alternatives expands with the formation by African-American men of the Colored Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania.

The following year African-American women establish their own organization, the Colored Female Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania. Some Black businesses begin to feature free produce; in Philadelphia, a Black confectioner who only uses sugar from “free will” labor sources supplies the wedding cake of White abolitionist Angelina Grimké.

But the movement, which promises a broader reach with the creation in 1838 of the American Free Produce Association, proves ineffective and soon fades. Demand for slave-produced sugar, cotton cloth and other goods is largely unaffected, and equivalent free produce is more expensive, sometimes hard to locate, and generally of poorer quality.

In contrast to the American experience, British abolitionists have notable success with boycotting sugar produced by enslaved people. At its height, the campaign waged by consumers, shopkeepers and merchants in Britain attracts more than 400,000 participants.

Sugar bowl, circa 1820s. Photo by Andreas Praefcke. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

1830 Congress seizes Native lands, triggers slavery expansion

The Indian Removal Act is passed on May 28, 1830. Source: General Records of the United States Government, National Archives.

Congress passes the Indian Removal Act, which dispossesses tens of thousands of Native Americans of their ancestral lands, makes millions of acres of those lands available to White settlers, and lays the foundation for the expansion of slavery.

The new law provides "for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi." Within a decade, as many as 100,000 Native Americans from at least 18 tribal nations are forced to move west to live on government-allocated lands.

The Indian Removal Act is the cornerstone of a broader policy of ethnic cleansing, aggressively promoted and implemented by U.S. president Andrew Jackson. A Tennessee frontiersman, land speculator, soldier, and enslaver – his plantation near Nashville has 150 enslaved workers – Jackson is also a notorious “Indian fighter.”

During his military career, Jackson gains considerable experience extracting land from Indigenous nations that he has overcome on the battlefield. In 1814, after Jackson’s forces defeat Creeks who had opposed American expansion, he compels the tribe to cede 23 million acres of their ancestral lands – in what is now Georgia and Alabama – to the U.S. government. Between 1816 and 1820, he negotiates five treaties with the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw peoples that require them to surrender millions of additional acres.

The new law requires that these four tribes and the Seminoles relocate to “Indian Territory,” a federally designated prairie area that includes and surrounds the modern-day state of Oklahoma. (The name Oklahoma is derived from the Choctaw words "okla," meaning “people,” and "humma," which translates as “red.”)

The prospect of removal sharply divides many Native communities, with some tribal members opposing removal and others hoping to actively negotiate for the most favorable terms possible in light of what they believe to be an inevitable process of forced relocation. Indeed, within a decade, the U.S. government and its military forces largely empty the lands east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes of their Indigenous populations. Entire communities are disrupted, traumatized, and destroyed.

In the southeast, resistance to removal is strongest within the Cherokee Nation. Despite the support of abolitionists – who view the removal plan as a cynical land grab for slavery – and a petition campaign by the Cherokees and their allies, the plan is approved by Congress and implemented in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling. Sixteen thousand Cherokees are forced to march 1,200 miles westward to Indian Territory. Four thousand of them die of exposure, hunger, and disease during the tragic journey, which Cherokees call the “Trail of Tears.” The lands they are forced to leave behind are distributed to White settlers by lottery.

In her autobiography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, the late Cherokee principal chief Wilma Mankiller writes: “The fledgling United States government’s method of dealing with native people – a process which then included systematic genocide, property theft, and total subjugation – reached its nadir in 1830 under the federal policy of President Andrew Jackson. More than any other president, he used forcible removal to expel the eastern tribes from their land. From the very birth of the nation, the United States government truly had carried out a vigorous operation of extermination and removal.”

1830 Abolitionists lead church desegregation effort

In Massachusetts, Black abolitionists and their White allies protest the racism and religious hypocrisy of Boston’s Park Street Church for barring a Black congregant and his family from using the pew he has purchased there.

At the time, almost all churches in the state are White-led, and their pews are reserved for Whites; Black worshippers are confined to the gallery or boxes at the back of the church.

Frederick Brinsley, a clothing store owner, has acquired the pew from a prosperous White businessman, Henry Farnum, who had begun attending a more theologically liberal church. It seems likely that Farnum is sympathetic to the cause of church desegregation.

Park Street, Boston as depicted by an anonymous artist in about 1815. Park Street Church is in the foreground. Source: Public Domain.

The challenge posed by Brinsley and his family – they twice attend services in their pew before being prevented from doing so again – is part of a concerted strategy by the Massachusetts General Colored Association (MGCA) to publicize White racism and to push for equal civil rights for African Americans in the state. Brinsley himself is a founding member of the MCGA, the country’s first Black abolitionist organization, which is in the forefront of campaigns for equal education, legalizing interracial marriage, and desegregating public transportation and public accommodations.

Two other MGCA founders – Hosea and Joshua Eaton – had already engaged in protests against segregated church seating; and another member, David Walker, had been influenced by Bishop Richard Allen, whose widely publicized protest in 1787 against segregated worship in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania led him to establish the independent African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Brinsley’s exclusion from Park Street, an evangelical Congregational church, quickly becomes a cause celebre in the wider world of abolitionism “as a potent symbol of all that was wrong in America’s treatment of its black citizens,” writes historian and law professor Marc Arkin in an article published in The New England Quarterly. White anti-slavery activists including William Lloyd Garrison add their voices to the chorus of criticism of The Park Street Church. And pew segregation becomes a staple in the columns of Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator.

Records show that Park Street Church leaders meet five or six times to develop a form of pew ownership that excludes anyone of color. Brinsley is forced to surrender the title to his pew.

Activists also make pew segregation an issue at another conservative Boston church – the Charles Street Baptist Church. In 1836, piano manufacturer Timothy Gilbert, a White abolitionist and a deacon at the church, and several Black congregants challenge segregated seating by sitting together in Gilbert’s pew. They and other vocally anti-slavery members are subsequently expelled from the church. In 1843, they establish the First Free Baptist Church by buying a theater on Tremont Street in Boston, adapting it for religious worship, and renaming it Tremont Temple. The congregation is racially integrated and attendance is free. In the ensuing years, Tremont Temple becomes a regular venue for abolitionist meetings.

According to Marc Arkin, pew desegregation campaigns help to forge an alliance between Black and White activists that is critical to the growth of northern abolitionism.

1830 David Walker dies; TB listed as cause

A page from Boston city records in 1830 lists the death of David Walker and the cause of his death as consumption.

Walker was buried in the South Boston Burial Ground that was later closed and, by 1868, replaced by a school. It is not known what happened to any human remains from the site. Source: Massachusetts Town Vital Records.

Dynamic Black abolitionist leader David Walker is found dead outside his house on Beacon Hill in Boston, Massachusetts on August 6.

Walker had a bounty on his head, and speculation is rife among Black Bostonians that he has been poisoned by agents of Southern planters. No confirming evidence comes to light; the official cause of death listed in city records is consumption (tuberculosis).

Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which calls on African Americans to resist slavery and unite against oppression, is being widely circulated in the South through clandestine networks of friends and allies. Fearing the incendiary pamphlet will incite revolts among the enslaved, authorities do everything in their power to suppress it.

1831 Flagship anti-slavery paper is launched

The first issue of The Liberator is published on January 1 by White abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp in Boston, Massachusetts.

The influential anti-slavery newspaper appears every week until 1865 when slavery in the U.S. is officially abolished. Garrison will emerge as a national leader of the abolitionist movement, helping to spearhead its growth and broaden its base.

Growing up in poverty in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Garrison apprentices at a local newspaper. Before launching The Liberator, he briefly co-edits the Genius of Universal Emancipation, the anti-slavery paper published by Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore, Maryland.

A devout reader of the Bible and a pacifist – Garrison is scathingly critical of churches that refuse to support the abolition effort – he nonetheless admires and defends the revolutionary Black abolitionist David Walker and his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, respectfully reviewing it at length in The Liberator.

Southern enslavers and northern conservatives alike accuse Garrison of inciting slave rebellions. While Garrison denies the charges, he clearly aligns himself with resistance by the enslaved. Commenting on the brutal reprisals that follow the failed revolt by enslaved people led by preacher Nat Turner in Virginia in August 1831, Garrison writes: “A dastardly triumph, well becoming a nation of oppressors.”

"The Liberator," Vol. 1, No. 6., 1831. Source: Boston Public Library.

The Black community rallies around Garrison, and its financial support is critical to sustaining The Liberator. Four hundred and fifty of the first 500 subscribers to the paper are African Americans. Garrison declares that the paper belongs to people of color – “it is their organ” – and he publishes their speeches and letters, proceedings of local meetings and conventions, and obituaries.

Echoing his Black allies, Garrison calls for Black civil and political rights and the immediate abolition of slavery without compensation to enslavers. He adopts and promotes the tactic of “moral suasion,” geared to awakening public opinion to the brutal and immoral realities of slavery and racism. Garrison is committed to convincing White Americans to recognize African Americans as their “fellow countrymen.”

In 1832, with a group of other White “immediatists,” Garrison launches the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) in the basement of the historic Black Baptist church on Belknap Street on Boston's Beacon Hill. Several leading Black abolitionists, who are already organized in the Massachusetts General Colored Association, register their support by adding their names to NEASS’s founding document.

Within a year, nearly 50 anti-slavery societies, modeled after the NEASS, have sprung up in free states across the country. As activism surges, Garrison proposes the formation of a national society devoted to abolition and Black rights. The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) is founded in 1833. Five years later it has grown to some 2,000 affiliated groups with between 100,000 and 150,000 members – perhaps as high as 250,000, according to some historians.

Garrison disagrees with some of his fellow abolitionist leaders on two key issues. One is whether the U.S. constitution implicitly supports or repudiates slavery. Garrison and his allies insist that it is fundamentally pro-slavery; thus, engaging in elections is tantamount to legitimizing slavery and its evils. Abolitionists, they feel, should continue to be agitators, questioning the very foundations of the slave-holding republic and thereby moving the political center to the left. A group of those who believe the opposite – that the constitution is an anti-slavery document – break away from the AASS in 1840 to form the Liberty Party and work within electoral politics to advance the cause.

The other divisive issue concerns the role of women. Garrison is a strong advocate of women’s rights and his promotion of it within the anti-slavery movement causes some abolitionists to leave the AASS and form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which does not admit women.

After the end of the Civil War, Garrison closes down The Liberator and withdraws from the AASS. He continues to participate in public reform movements, including civil rights for Black Americans and women’s rights. During the 1870s, he becomes a major figure in New England's women suffrage campaigns.

1831 Militias, mobs slaughter Black people after revolt

"Discovery of Nat Turner," October 30, 1831, published in A Popular History of the United States (1882). Source: Library of Congress.

Charismatic preacher Nat Turner leads an uprising in Southampton, Virginia that crests a wave of resistance by enslaved people in other states, notably North Carolina and Louisiana.

The rebels kill between 55 and 65 people, at least 51 of whom are White. The revolt is suppressed within a few days, but Turner survives in hiding for more than two months before he is captured. He and 22 other rebels are hanged, and authorities sell and transport out of the state another 21 of those convicted.

After his execution, Turner's body is dissected and flayed, and his skin is used to make souvenir purses. Newspapers later report that a Virginia doctor employs Turner’s skeleton as a medical specimen.

Amid widespread fear among Whites of further insurrection, militias and rampaging mobs in the area butcher some 120 enslaved and free Black people, including women and children. Rumors that the revolt has spread as far south as Alabama, with “armies of slaves” on the move, prompt a two-week wave of indiscriminate killings of Black residents by Whites.

In the wake of the Turner uprising, state legislatures in the South pass new laws that prohibit the education of enslaved and free Black people, restrict rights of assembly and other civil liberties for free Black residents, and require White ministers to be present at all worship services.

1831 Brutal crackdown after Jamaica rebellion sparks outcry

The largest revolt of enslaved people in the history of the British colonies takes place in Jamaica.

The so-called Baptist War or Christmas Rebellion, led by Jamaican Baptist preacher Samuel Sharpe, involves some 60,000 of the 300,000 enslaved people on the island. Rebels set fire to more than 100 properties, destroying over 40 sugar works and the houses of nearly 100 planters.

Some 500 enslaved people are killed during the 11-day uprising, and more than 300 are later executed and buried in mass graves. The brutal suppression increases public support in Britain for ending slavery; the British parliament outlaws it two years later.

Statues of National Hero Samuel Sharpe and his followers in Sam Sharpe Square, Montego Bay, Jamaica. Source: The Jamaica Gleaner, 2012

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