Chapter 6. Timeline for the Founding and Early National Eras, 1776-1800
The Founding and Early National Eras, 1776-1800
| 1776, July 4 | Declaration of Independence issued by Continental Congress |
| 1780-1804 | Gradual Emancipation Acts in PA, etc.: following the example of Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of March, 1780, most northern states (including all of those that had significant populations of slaves) began the process of ending slavery through gradual emancipation. Pennsylvania’s law prohibited any new imports of slaves and declared that all children born in Pennsylvania from this point on, regardless of their parents’ status, would be free. However, those who were slaves in 1780 would remain so for life. Children born to an enslaved mother would have to work as indentured servants for their masters until they turned 28. This law meant that slavery itself lasted in Pennsylvania well into the 1840s, albeit with a dwindling population of slaves. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed very similar laws in 1784, except that the end of indentured servitude for children born into slavery was set in Connecticut at 25, and in Rhode Island at18 for girls and 21 for boys. Similar laws were passed by New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804. Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire abolished slavery more immediately (from April, 1783; see below). |
| 1781, March | Articles of Confederation, written in 1777, finally ratified by all thirteen states. The Continental Congress was then replaced by the new Congress of the Confederation as the official U.S. government (until 1789) |
| 1781, Oct. | Yorktown, VA: British forces under General Cornwallis surrendered. This ended major war efforts on both sides. |
| 1783 | Slavery Abolished in Massachusetts, NH, and VT: although its implications were at first uncertain, a Massachusetts court case declared the abolition of slavery in this state. In Commonwealth v. Jennison (April, 1783), Massachusetts’ high court considered a charge of assault and battery brought by a slave against his master. Deciding in favor of the plaintiff, the court held that the declaration made in Massachusetts’ Constitution of 1780 that, “all men are born free and equal,” meant that slavery was effectively abolished. The state’s strong anti-slavery sentiment reinforced this interpretation. A similarly early and complete abolition probably occurred in New Hampshire, where the state constitution of 1783 had language like that of Massachusetts, and where anti-slavery sentiment was also strong, but court cases showing this are lacking. Vermont, which became a state in 1791, had already abolished slavery in its earlier constitution of 1777. However, both of these states, and especially Vermont, had very few African American residents of any kind. |
| 1783, Sept. | Treaty of Paris officially ended the Revolutionary war, with Britain formally recognizing the independence of the U.S.A. America agreed to make restitution for the properties of British loyalists that had been seized during the war. Britain recognized American control of all of the former British possessions east of the Mississippi River, south of the Great Lakes, and north of Florida. Both countries would have access to the Mississippi River. |
| 1783, Sept. | Peace of Paris: the generic name for all of the treaties agreed upon to settle the American Revolutionary War. In addition to the Treaty of Paris between Britain and the U.S., Britain made separate treaties at Versailles (near Paris) with France and Spain. France and Britain agreed to return largely to what they had had before the war with respect to each other’s overseas colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere. In exchange for the Bahamas, Britain ceded Florida back to Spain (Britain had acquired Florida in 1763 at the end of the French and Indian War), but without clarifying Florida’s northern boundary. The treaty also recognized Spanish control of Louisiana (known at the time as West Florida), which included New Orleans, thus giving Spain control over commerce on the Mississippi River—potentially contradicting one of the provisions of the treaty between Britain and the U.S. |
| 1784 | John Adams’ negotiations with Britain fail. Claiming that the U.S. had not made restitution for loyalists’ property as required by the Treaty of Paris, Britain maintained its forts along the southern shores of the Great Lakes (e.g., at Detroit and Niagara), while arming and supporting Native Americans of the region against American settlers. In 1784 Congress sent John Adams to London to try to resolve these problems and to negotiate a new commercial treaty that would allow American traders greater access to British domestic markets. But Britain conceded nothing, refusing through the 1780s even to send an ambassador to the U.S., in part because of the view that the U.S. were really thirteen separate nations. |
| 1784-86 | Jay-Gardoqui Treaty rejected by Congress (1786). Despite the terms of the Peace of Paris allowing Americans free navigation on the Mississippi, in 1784 Spain closed the port of New Orleans to American shipping. Congress sent John Jay to Spain to negotiate a new treaty concerning both navigation on the Mississippi and the precise border between Georgia and Spanish Florida, where Spanish-supported Creek Indians claimed lands also claimed by the U.S. Jay negotiated a treaty with the Spanish diplomat Diego de Gardoqui that left the Mississippi under Spanish control for twenty years, but settled the Florida border in the U.S.’s favor and opened Spanish domestic markets to American traders. In Congress, northern states accepted this, but the southern states angrily rejected it. No agreement was reached, leaving both the Florida border and the Mississippi tense and intermittently violent. |
| 1785, May | Land Ordinance of 1785 passed by the Confederation Congress in New York, establishing a uniform system for surveying and selling the public lands of the west that the U.S. acquired from the Treaty of Paris of 1783. This law stipulated that these lands should be divided into townships of 36 square miles, made up of 36 sections of one square mile or 640 acres each. Four sections were reserved to the U.S. federal government, and one section was to be reserved for public schools. This grid or ‘rectangular’ survey system shaped the pattern of settlement across much of the American Midwest and West. |
| 1786-87 | Shays’s Rebellion: small farmers in western Massachusetts rebelled against their creditors and the courts trying to collect their debts by forcibly closing many courts. Under the leadership of Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War veteran, they also demanded tax relief, paper money, and a moratorium on debts. After several months the Massachusetts militia succeeded in dispersing the rebels, but this incident helped to persuade many political leaders that a new U.S. constitution was necessary. |
| 1787, July | Northwest Ordinance passed by the Confederation Congress (in New York), establishing the lands north of the Ohio River and west of Pennsylvania as the Northwest Territory, in which slavery was prohibited. This ordinance also created procedures for incorporating new territories and states. For new territories, Congress would appoint a governor and judges, and when the population reached 5000 adult males, the settlers would write a temporary constitution and elect a territorial legislature. A bill of rights was included for this territorial stage. When the population reached 60,000, the residents would write a state constitution, which Congress would approve before admitting the new state. |
| 1787 | Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, from May 25 to Sept. 17 |
| 1788, June | U.S. Constitution ratified by Virginia on June 22, bringing the total of ratifying states to nine and making it the law of the land. |
| 1789-91 | First U.S. Congress began meeting in March, 1789, first in New York City, then in Philadelphia (it continued until March, 1791). |
| 1789 | George Washington elected as President (unanimously in the Electoral College), and was sworn in on April 30. He served as president, with John Adams as the Vice-President, through a second term, to March, 1797. |
| 1789, Sept. | Judiciary Act passed by Congress, creating the federal judiciary based on the brief outline of the Constitution’s Article III. This law created thirteen federal district courts, three courts of appeal, and a Supreme Court with six justices. |
| 1789, Sept. | Twelve Amendments to the Constitution approved by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. Ten of these were ratified by Dec., 1791, forming what has become known as the Bill of Rights. One of the two amendments not ratified at the time was finally incorporated into the Constitution in 1992 by the 27th Amendment, which states that no law affecting the salaries of Senators and Representatives can take effect until after an election of Representatives has intervened. Another proposed amendment has never been ratified; it sought to set the number of people represented by each member of the House of Representatives. |
| 1790, March | Naturalization Act signed into law, expanding on the authority given to Congress in this area (C1.8.4). It allowed for the naturalization of “free white persons” who had resided in the U.S. for two years (i.e., making them citizens). Subsequent acts revised the required period of residency to five years (1795), then fourteen years (1798), then back to five years (1802). |
| 1791, Feb. | First Bank of the U.S. chartered by Congress, for twenty years. Part of Hamilton’s plans for the U.S. fiscal system, the Bank of the U.S. was a private corporation, but by its charter it acted as the depository for federal taxes, as well as the main lender to the federal government. The bank’s notes also served as a national circulating medium that facilitated tax payments and commercial transactions, thereby increasing the economy’s money supply. Although in 1811 Congress did not renew its charter, in 1816 it created a Second Bank of the U.S., again with a twenty-year charter. |
| 1791, March | Vermont became the fourteenth state. |
| 1791, Dec. 15 | Bill of Rights, or the first ten Amendments to the Constitution, ratified by three-fourths (eleven) of the states, Dec. 15, 1791. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson certified their adoption on March 1, 1792. |
| 1792, May | Militia Act passed to create federal standards for state militias, based on the power given to Congress regulate them (C1.8.15-16). State militias could be used in national defense, as commanded by the President (C2.2.1) and approved by Congress, against both foreign and domestic threats. |
| 1792, June | Kentucky became the fifteenth state. |
| 1793, Feb. | Fugitive Slave Law. This law was actually just part of a broader law concerning fugitives from justice more generally. The sections concerning slaves added detail to the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause (4.2.3). The law stipulated that, in order to apprehend any “person held to labor” in any state or territory under the laws thereof who escapes to another state or territory, the person to whom such labor is due or his or her agent may seize the fugitive, and then bring the fugitive before a judge of the city, state, or federal district in which the fugitive is apprehended. If the judge is satisfied with that the person is such a fugitive, then the claimant should be given a certificate allowing him or his agent to return the fugitive. |
| 1794, March | Slave Trade Act prohibited any direct involvement by American ships or ports in the international slave trade. The Constitution (1.9.1) guaranteed that states could continue to import slaves until at least 1808 (i.e., Congress could not prohibit such imports until then), and Georgia and South Carolina imported about 100,000 new slaves between 1800 and 1808. But Congress could regulate the slave trade, and subsequent acts of 1800 and 1803 added further restrictions, prohibiting any American sailors or investors from participating in the slave trade, even on foreign ships. Congress finally ended the slave trade to the U.S. in 1808. |
| 1794, July | Whiskey Rebellion. In order to pay debts from the Revolutionary War, in March, 1791, Congress supplemented its revenues from customs duties (tariffs on imports) by creating the first domestic tax, a tax on distilled spirits that became known as the “whiskey tax.” This tax was resisted especially by small farmers west of the Appalachians, who relied on distilling to market their surplus grain. When resistance in western Pennsylvania became violent in July, 1794, the federal government called up the militias of Pennsylvania and neighboring states. Faced with the approach of an army of perhaps 15,000 under George Washington’s leadership, the rebels quickly dispersed. This incident showed the power of the new federal government, providing a strong contrast with Shays’s Rebellion of 1786-7, which Massachusetts had had to face on its own. |
| 1795, Feb. | Eleventh Amendment ratified. One of the most obscure amendments, the Eleventh Amendment was passed to close a loophole in the Constitution that had allowed a citizen of South Carolina to sue the state of Georgia for breach of contract, a claim upheld by the Supreme Court in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793). According to Common Law precedent, states were considered immune from such suits brought by their own citizens (in these cases states had “sovereign immunity”), but the Supreme Court had held that the Constitution’s wording (3.2.1) allowed citizens of other states to bring such suits. This would give an out-of-state citizen an advantage over state residents, upsetting the Constitution’s goal of interstate equality, as expressed in its clauses concerning diversity jurisdiction (3.2.1), full faith and credit (4.1), privileges and immunities (4.2.1), and judicial comity (4.2.2-3). In order to restore this equality and overturn the precedent set by Chisholm, the Eleventh Amendment stipulated that out-of-state citizens would have no special access to federal courts in cases brought against a state that did not concern federal law. |
| 1795, June | Jay Treaty ratified by the Senate. Negotiated by John Jay, this treaty finally resolved a number of issues concerning the implementation of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the Revolutionary War. In one of the earliest uses of formal arbitration in international agreements, the parties agreed to submit to arbitration both American claims concerning the boundary with Canada and the presence of British troops in the Northwest Territory and British claims that the U.S. had not fulfilled its promises in 1783 to make restitution for property seized from British nationals and to end confiscations from American loyalists. Other issues included improving trade between the two countries and ending the “impressment,” or forced conscription, of American sailors into the British navy. The treaty went into effect in early 1796 and succeeded, despite strong opposition from the Democratic-Republicans, in creating much improved relations for the ten years that it was in force. But in 1806 it was not renewed by the Jefferson administration, and tensions between the two countries again grew, resulting ultimately in the War of 1812. |
| 1796 | John Adams elected as the second president. He served one term, from 1797 to 1801. Partly because of the way electoral votes were counted based on the Constitution (C2.1.3), Jefferson, Adams’ political opponent, was elected as Vice President. The two remained political adversaries throughout their four years in office. |
| 1796 | Tennessee became the sixteenth state. |
| 1798-1800 | Quasi-War with France. As Revolutionary France extended its control over much of Europe, the war between France and Britain that had begun in 1793 intensified, and both nations sometimes interfered with or blocked American shipping. The Adams administration strongly favored Britain, and also refused to keep paying debts to France owed for its aid during the American Revolution. Beginning in July, 1798, the U.S. and France fought an undeclared war, mostly at sea, which lasted until September, 1800. |
| 1798, June-July | Alien and Sedition Acts passed. Of these four laws, three targeted aliens, raising the residency requirements for citizenship from 5 to 14 years and authorizing the arrest and deportation of any aliens charged with any anti-government or pro-French activity. The Sedition Act made it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the Government. |
| 1798-99 | Virginia & Kentucky Resolutions written to protest the Alien and Sedition laws, and to sketch out an alternative theory of the federal government, according to which states could nullify acts of the federal government that they considered to be unconstitutional. |
| 1799-1800 | Fries Rebellion broke out among the German-speaking population of SE Pennsylvania (aka the “Pennsylvania Dutch”), many of whom protested against or refused to pay a new federal property tax. This tax, passed in July, 1798, to help pay for the Quasi-War with France, was assessed on property like houses and land, and was sometimes referred to as the House Tax. The amount of this tax was very small, and it was soon ended, but it was one of the few “direct” taxes implemented by the federal government before the Civil War (others were assessed during the War of 1812). This type of tax, plus the federal tax assessors’ inspections that it required, incensed some people. Many of those who participated in or led the rebellion, including John Fries, were vigorously prosecuted by the Adams administration and the federal courts. |
| 1800, May | Slave Trade Act amended the Slave Trade Act of 1794 by further restricting American participation. Whereas the earlier law had focused on American ships and ports, this law prohibited any Americans from participating in the slave trade as individual investors in foreign ships, or as sailors or merchants on foreign ships. A subsequent law of 1803 would add new fines for anyone who brought newly imported slaves into states that prohibited the slave trade. Finally, in 1807 another law finally ended the slave trade to the U.S. |
| 1800, Dec. | Thomas Jefferson elected as third president. He served two terms, from 1801 to 1809. The election of 1800 was marred by another problem that arose from the way electoral votes were counted (C2.1.3). The political allies Jefferson and Aaron Burr both received the same number of votes, a tie that was only settled with difficulty by the outgoing Congress. |
The Antebellum (Pre-Civil War) Period, 1800-
| 1803, Feb. | Marbury v. Madison case decided by Chief Justice John Marshall. This decision declared as unconstitutional one minor provision in the Judiciary Act of 1789, which provision (Sec. 13) gave the Supreme Court jurisdiction over a type of court order (writs of mandamus). Although the act of striking down this provision of the law had no larger impact in itself, Marshall’s decision is often seen as helping to establish the Supreme Court’s capacity to subject federal legislation to “judicial review,” i.e., to decide its constitutionality. |
| 1803, Oct. | Louisiana Purchase ratified. |
| 1804, June | Twelfth Amendment ratified, changing the voting procedures in the Electoral College in presidential elections. It required the Electors to cast two distinct ballots, one for president and one for vice-president. The original Constitution (2.1.3), not anticipating the development of political parties and their ability to form majorities behind a single national “ticket” or list of candidates, had stipulated that each state Elector should cast two votes for president: the person receiving the most votes would become president, and the person receiving the second-most would become vice-president. In the election of 1796, this procedure filled these two offices with the opponents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, while in the election of 1800 it allowed for a tie between the political allies Jefferson and Aaron Burr. |
| 1807, March | Slave Trade to the U.S. Abolished, effective January 1, 1808. This law outlawed the slave trade to the U.S. as soon as it was possible based on the Constitution (1.9.1). Because enforcement was difficult, some slaves continued to be imported. Also, this prohibition did not affect the domestic trade in slaves within and among the states. |