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1840-1849 |
Political and
Social History |
Literature |
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1840 |
4 July. The Independent Treasury Act is
signed into law by President Martin Van Buren. It makes the federal
government exclusively responsible for managing its own funds.
At the Anti-Slavery Convention in London,
William Lloyd Garrison and others walk out when women abolitionists are not
allowed to be seated as delegates.
U. S. population: 17,069,453.
William Henry Harrison ("Old Tippecanoe")
defeats incumbent Martin Van Buren for the presidency.
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Transcendentalist Club begins to publish
The Dial with
Margaret
Fuller as the first editor
Bronson
Alcott, Orphic Sayings
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Two Years Before the
Mast
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1841 |
Supreme Court upholds lower court ruling and
allows the Amistad mutineers to return to Africa.
13 August. The Independent Treasury Act is
repealed.
4 March. William Henry Harrison is inaugurated
as president. Chilled through after a lengthy outdoor ceremony, the
68-year-old Harrison contracts pneumonia and dies on 4 April.
Vice-President John Tyler becomes president.
7 November. Slaves aboard the Creole
mutiny and sail the ship to Nassau, a British port, where they are freed.
Forty-eight wagons arrive in Sacramento by way
of the Oregon Trail, one of the earliest large groups to make this journey.
Brook Farm
Institute is founded 9 miles from Boston (1841-47).
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Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series (including "Self-Reliance")
Edgar Allan
Poe becomes editor of Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia
Melville sails for 18 months on whaler Acushnet and jumps ship in
the Marquesas in July 1842.
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1842 |
May. Colonel John C. Fremont leads an
expedition to explore the Rocky Mountains.
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Poe,
Reviews of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales |
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1843 |
Beginning of large migration westward.
Second Seminole War ends.
Sculptor Hiram Powers completes The Greek
Slave.
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Henry
James, Jr., born in New York City.
Poe,
"The Gold Bug"; "The Black Cat"
The
New-Englander (1843-92)
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1844 |
Aggressive expansionist James K. Polk defeats
Henry Clay for the presidency.
The Springfield Republican, edited by
Samuel Bowles, is founded; Bowles will publish Emily Dickinson's poetry
years later.
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Emerson,
Essays: Second Series (including "Experience" and "The Poet"
Bronson
Alcott
and his family spend seven months at Fruitlands. See the
Concord
chronology for more dates.
Littell's
Living Age (1844-1900)
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1845 |
In The United States Magazine and
Democratic Review, John L. O'Sullivan writes of "the fulfillment of our
manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence," and
the phrase catches on with expansionist politicians and the public.
Anti-rent wars in New York State protest the
patroonship system.
Texas joins the union as the 28th
state.
Potato famine in Ireland brings great numbers
of Irish immigrants. See the
"Interpreting the Irish Famine, 1846-1850" site at the
University
of Virginia and
"Views of the Famine," Vassar's pictures and text from contemporary
newspapers.
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Poe,
The Raven and Other Poems
Margaret
Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Henry
David Thoreau begins living at Walden Pond
Johnson Jones Hooper, Simon Suggs
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave
American
Whig Review (1848-52)
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1846 |
3 May. The Battle at Palo Alto in which 2300
Americans put to rout twice as many Mexican forces marks the beginning of
the Mexican War. At President Polk's request, on 11 May Congress declares
the U.S. at war with Mexico.
6 June. Treaty with Great Britain extends the
Oregon Territory boundary at latitude 40 degrees to Puget Sound. This allows
President James K. Polk to focus his attention on the war with Mexico.
14 June. In California, U.S. settlers
proclaim the independent Republic of California, which in August is annexed
by the United States.
15 August. U.S. annexation of New Mexico,
formerly a Mexican territory.
Iowa becomes a state.
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James Russell Lowell publishes the first of
"The Bigelow Papers" in the Boston Courier to voice his opposition to
war with Mexico.
Poe,"The
Philosophy of Composition"
Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse (includes "Roger Malvin's
Burial" and "Young Goodman Brown")
Melville, Typee
Whitman
editor of The Brooklyn Eagle
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1847 |
22-23 February. Battle of Buena Vista in which
General Taylor's army of 4800 men defeats General Santa Anna's 15,000-man
force.
9 March. General Winfield Scott's forces lay
siege to Vera Cruz and take it on 29 March.
8 September. Scott occupies the heights of
Chapultepec and later marches into Mexico City.
22 December. New congressman Abraham Lincoln
makes a speech opposing the Mexican War.
Senator Lewis Cass proposes "popular
sovereignty" by which residents of territories decide whether the state will
be slave or free.
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Frederick Douglass founds The North Star, an abolitionist
newspaper.
Emerson,
Poems (includes "Hamatreya" and "Each and All")
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline
Melville, Omoo
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1848 |
24 January. James Marshall discovers gold
near Sutter's Fort, California. News of the find begins the California Gold
Rush of 1849.
Mexican War ends with the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo. In exchange for $15 million and the settling of $3.25 million in
American claims, Mexico cedes some 500,000 square miles of its territory in
the western and southwestern U.S.
 12-20
July. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organize the first American
women's rights convention in
Seneca Falls, New York, where the
Declaration of
Sentiments was signed by 68 women and 32 men. Picture of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery site on the
Seneca Falls
Convention.
Free Soil party organizes and nominates Martin
Van Buren on an anti-slavery platform.
John Humphrey Noyes establishes the
Oneida Community,
a communal society based on the principles of
"complex marriage"
and perfectionism. The society disbands in 1880.
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James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics
Joel Chandler Harris born (d. 1928)
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1849 |
Amelia Bloomer begins publishing The Lily,
a journal supporting temperance and women's rights.
 28
February. First gold seekers arrive in San Francisco. (Image
courtesy of the
Images of
American Political History site.)
Zachary Taylor inaugurated as 12th
president.
Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) escapes to the
North and begins working with the Underground Railroad. Tubman helps at
least 300 slaves to escape before the Civil War; during the war, she worked
as a nurse, cook, laundress, and, it is said, spy behind Confederate lines
for the Union forces.
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Thoreau, "Resistance to Civil Government"; A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers. Better known under the title "Civil Disobedience," his
"Resistance to Civil Government" recounts his experience in refusing to pay
his poll tax as a means of protesting the Mexican War.
Poe,
"The Bells"; "Annabel Lee"
Poe dies in Baltimore (b. 1809)
Sarah
Orne Jewett born
Melville, Redburn; Mardi
Rufus Griswold, The Female Poets of America
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28
February. First gold seekers arrive in San Francisco. (Image
courtesy of the
Images of
American Political History site.)