Historical Figures and Events in American History
Shays’s Rebellion
Shays’s Rebellion:this conflict in Massachusetts caused many to criticize the Articles of Confederation and admit the weak central government was not working; uprising led by Daniel Shays in an effort to prevent courts from foreclosing on the farms of those who could not pay the taxes
What is Shays rebellion?
A revolt by farmers to protest the high taxes and forced selling of their property.
What was the name of the leader of Shays rebellion?
Daniel Shays
Louisiana Purchase
Louisiana purchase: What is the Louisiana purchase?
The U.S., under Jefferson, bought the Louisiana territory from France, under the rule of Napoleon, in 1803. The U.S. paid $15 million for the Louisiana Purchase, and Napoleon gave up his empire in North America. The U.S. gained control of Mississippi trade route and doubled its size.
Sam Houston
Sam Houston: general is chosen by government planners to lead the Texas army. He trained the Texas fighters and defeated and captured Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass: is a powerful orator for the abolitionist movement. One of his reasons for writing the Narrative is to offer proof to critics who felt that such an articulate and intelligent man could not have once been a slave. Douglass progresses from unenlightened victim of the dehumanizing practices of slavery to an educated and empowered young man. He gains the resources and convictions to escape to the North and wage a political fight against the institution of slavery.
Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott Decision: Decision meant that all territories were opened up to slavery once again; Northern lawmakers would not be able to keep slavery out of the territories.
A Missouri slave sued for his freedom, claiming that his four-year stay in the northern portion of the Louisiana Territory made free land by the Missouri Compromise had made him a free man. The U.S, Supreme Court decided he couldn’t sue in federal court because he was property, not a citizen.
James Madison
James Madison: James Madison (1751-1836) was a founding father of the United States and the fourth American president, serving in office from 1809 to 1817. An advocate for a strong federal government, the Virginia-born Madison composed the first drafts of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and earned the nickname “Father of the Constitution.” In 1792, Madison and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) founded the Democratic-Republican Party, which has been called America’s first opposition political party. When Jefferson became the third U.S. president, Madison served as his secretary of state.
Madison, after undertaking an extensive study of other world governments, came to the conclusion that America needed a strong federal government in order to help regulate the state legislatures and create a better system for raising federal money. He felt the government should be set up with a system of checks and balances so no branch had greater power over the other. Madison also suggested that governors and judges have enhanced roles in government in order to help manage the state legislatures.
Madison played a strong role in the ratification process and wrote a number of essays outlining his support for the Constitution. His writings, along with those penned by other advocates, were released anonymously under the title “The Federalist,” a series of 85 essays produced between 1787 and 1788. After extensive debate, the U.S. Constitution was signed by members of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787. The document was ratified by the states in 1788 and the new government became functional the following year.
Little Turtle
Little Turtle: was a war chief of the Miami people, and one of the most famous Native American military leaders of his time. Historian Wiley Sword calls him”perhaps the most capable Indian leader than in the Old Northwest”[2] Mihšihkinaahkwa led a confederation of native warriors in several major victories against U.S. forces in the 1790s during the Northwest Indian Wars, also called Little Turtle’s War. In 1791 the confederation defeated General Arthur St. Clair, who lost 900 men in the most decisive loss by the U.S. Army against Native American forces.
Little Turtle’s native name in historical records was spelled in a variety of ways, including Michikinikwa, Meshekunnoghquoh, Michikinakoua, Michikiniqua, Me-She-Kin-No-Quah, Meshecunnaquan, and Mischecanocquah. Mihšihkinaahkwa is the correct phonetic spelling of the name in the Miami-Illinois language.
Little Turtle was selected as the war chief of the Atchatchakangouen division of the Myaamiaki (Miami people)through his demonstration of military prowess in battle. Little Turtle earned this designation during the American Revolutionary War in action against a French force allied with the American patriots. Although he was war chief of the leading division of the tribe, Little Turtle was never the head chief of the Miami, which was a hereditary position.
Little Turtle emerged as a war chief among the Miami people by defeating the French military adventurer Augustin de La Balme.In October 1780 La Balme plundered the principal Miami village of Kekionga (present-day Fort Wayne), as part of his campaign to attack the British in Detroit. On November 5, 1780, Little Turtle led an attack on La Balme’s camp along the Eel River, killing La Balme and thirty of his men. The victory brought an end to the campaign and established Little Turtle’s reputation as a war leader. Through the 1780s, Little Turtle continued to lead raids against colonial American settlements in Kentucky, fighting on the side of the British. However, the Miami were not unified in their support of the British. The Piankashaw Miami supported the rebel Americans, while the Wea Miami vacillated between the British and Americans.
Native Americans living in the territory resisted the encroaching American settlements and violence escalated in the area. Native tribes formed the Western Confederacy with the goal of keeping the Ohio River as a boundary between Indian lands and the United States. Little Turtle emerged as one of the war leaders of the Confederacy, which also included the Shawnee under Blue Jacket and Delaware under Buckongahelas. The war with the American that followed became known as the Northwest Indian War, also called”Little Turtle’s Wa”.
Little Turtle helped to lead Native Americans against federal forces led by General Josiah Harmar in late 1790. In an effort to end the border war with native tribes in the area, the U.S. government sent an expedition of American troops under the command of General Harmar, but his forces lacked sufficient training and were poorly supplied. (Because the United States had mostly disbanded its military after the American Revolution, it had few professional soldiers to send into battle, a weakness that Little Turtle and other native leaders fully exploited.) In October 1790 Little Turtle and Blue Jacket won two victories against Harmar’s men. These successes encouraged further resistance] In addition, previously reluctant leaders among the Ottawa and Wyandot joined the Confederacy.
John Fremont
: In 1838 Poinsett—by then the U.S. secretary of war—commissioned Frémont as a second lieutenant of topographical engineers for the U.S. Army and assigned him to assist the French scientist Joseph Nicolas Nicollet on a three-year mission of surveying and mapping the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Frémont also headed an expedition (1841) to survey the Des Moines River for Nicollet, the Frenchman having given him expert instruction in geology, topography, and astronomy. His growing taste for wilderness exploration was whetted by the expansionist enthusiasm of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who became his adviser, sponsor, and, in 1841, father-in-law. Benton’s influence in government enabled Frémont to accomplish within the next few years the mapping of much of the territory between the Mississippi valley and the Pacific Ocean.
In 1842, as emigration to the Oregon country in the Pacific Northwest was growing dramatically in importance for the nation, the War Department sent Frémont on an expedition to survey the route west from the Mississippi River to the Wyoming region. While in the Wind River Range there, he scaled the mountain that now bears his name (Fremont Peak). In 1843, accompanied by the colorful guide Kit Carson and mountain man Thomas Fitzpatrick, he completed an even more important survey to the mouth of the Columbia River. After thoroughly exploring much of the Pacific Northwest, he went southward into the Mexican-controlled territory. He first went through what is now northwestern Nevada and then made a perilous westward winter crossing of the Sierra Nevada to California, reaching Fort Sutter on the Sacramento River in March 1844. That exploit, which was included in the report he made of the trip after returning east, added greatly to his fame.
Martin Delaney:
Dorothea Dix:Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was an author, teacher, and reformer. Her efforts on behalf of the mentally ill and prisoners helped create dozens of new institutions across the United States and in Europe and changed people’s perceptions of these populations. Charged during the American Civil War with the administration of military hospitals, Dix also established a reputation as an advocate for the work of female nurses. Her own troubled family background and impoverished youth served as a galvanizing force throughout her career, although she remained silent on her own biographical details for most of her long, productive life.
Dix would eventually establish a series of schools in Boston and Worcester, designing her own curriculum and administering classrooms as a teenager and young woman. In the 1820s Dix’s poor health made her teaching increasingly sporadic, forcing her to take frequent breaks from her career. She began to write, and her books—filled with the simple dictums and morals that were thought to edify young minds—sold briskly. By 1836, persistent health problems caused Dix to close her latest school for good.
The Asylum Movement
That same year Dix traveled in England with friends, returning home months later with an interest in new approaches to the treatment of the insane. She took a job teaching inmates in an East Cambridge prison, where conditions were so abysmal and the treatment of prisoners so inhumane that she began agitating at once for their improvement. Prisons at the time were unregulated and unhygienic, with violent criminals housed side by side with the mentally ill. Inmates were often subject to the whims and brutalities of their jailers. Dix visited every public and private facility she could access, documenting the conditions she found with unflinching honesty. She then presented her findings to the legislature of Massachusetts, demanding that officials take action toward reform. Her reports—filled with dramatic accounts of prisoners flogged, starved, chained, physically and sexually abused by their keepers, and left naked and without heat or sanitation—shocked her audience and galvanized a movement to improve conditions for the imprisoned and insane.
Dix volunteered her services one week after the Civil War (1861-1865) began. Shortly after her arrival in Washington in April 1861, she was appointed to organize and outfit the Union Army hospitals and to oversee the vast nursing staff that the war would require. As superintendent of women nurses, she was the first woman to serve in such a high capacity in a federally appointed role. With supplies pouring in from voluntary societies across the north, Dix’s administrative skills were sorely needed to manage the flow of bandages and clothing as the war wore on. Still, Dix often clashed with army officials and was widely feared and disliked by her volunteer female nurses. After months of hard work and exhaustion, she was eventually ousted from her position, stripped of authority by the fall of 1863 and sent home.
Mercy Warren: was a political writer and propagandist of the American Revolution. During the years before the American Revolution, Warren published poems and plays that attacked royal authority in Massachusetts and urged colonists to resist British infringements on colonial rights and liberties. Warren formed a strong circle of friends with whom she regularly corresponded, including Abigail Adams, John Adams, Martha Washington and Hannah Winthrop, wife to John Winthrop. In a letter to Catharine Macaulay she wrote: “America stands armed with resolution and virtue, but she still recoils at the idea of drawing the sword against the nation from whom she derived her origin. Yet Britain, like an unnatural parent, is ready to plunge her dagger into the bosom of her affectionate offspring.”[11]Through their correspondence they increased the awareness of women’s issues, were supportive, and influenced the course of events to further America’s cause. In 1773, she wrote The Defeat, also featuring the character based on Hutchinson. Hutchinson had no idea the accuracy of her plot nor completely comprehended the impact she made on his political fate. Warren’s assistance in the movement to remove Governor Hutchinson from his position through The Defeat was one of her greatest accomplishments, and she allowed the piece a rare happy ending.[14] Warren began to doubt as she wrote the third installment in her trilogy, feeling the power of her satire compromised her divine purpose to be a “member of the gentler sex,” but found encouragement from Abigail Adams, who told her, “God Almighty has entrusted [you] with Powers for the good of the World”.[15] With this affirmation, Warren then provided her sharpest political commentary yet: In 1775 Warren published The Group, a satire conjecturing what would happen if the British king abrogated the Massachusetts charter of rights. The anonymously published The Blockheads(1776) and The Motley Assembly (1779) are also attributed to her. In 1788 she published Observations on the New Constitution, whose ratification she opposed as an Anti-Federalist.
Andrew Jackson: As America’s political party system developed, Jackson became the leader of the new Democratic Party. A supporter of states’ rights and slavery’s extension into the new western territories, he opposed the Whig Party and Congress on polarizing issues such as the Bank of the United States. For some, his legacy is tarnished by his role in the forced relocation of Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi. In 1796, Jackson joined a convention charged with drafting the new Tennessee state constitution and became the first man to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee. Though he declined to seek reelection and returned home in March 1797, he was almost immediately elected to the U.S. Senate. Jackson resigned a year later and was elected judge of Tennessee’s superior court. He was later chosen to head the state militia, a position he held when war broke out with Great Britain in 1812. Jackson’s popularity led to suggestions that he run for president. Jackson was the nation’s first frontier president, and his election marked a turning point in American politics, as the center of political power shifted from East to West.