1859 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

President Buchanan orders that New Mexico Territory lands occupied by the confederated bands of Pima and Maricopa tribes near the Gila River be surveyed and set apart as a reservation under terms of a February 28 act of Congress. The reservation is not to exceed 100 square miles, and $10,000 is to be given to the tribes for tools and to cover the expenses of the land survey (the 64,000-acre reservation will be enlarged to 145,000 acres in 1869).

The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 March 7 in the case of Ableman v. Booth, reversing the 1854 Wisconsin court decision which called the act unconstitutional (see Dred Scott, 1857). A federal court had convicted abolitionist Wisconsin newspaper editor Sherman Booth of assisting a runaway slave and sentenced him to prison, he was released on a writ of habeas corpus, U.S. District Marshal Ableman obtained a writ of error from the Supreme Court, and the opinion of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney denying the right of state courts to interfere in federal cases is handed down without dissent.

Georgia prohibits the post-mortem manumission of slaves by last will and testament. The state legislature votes to let free blacks be sold into slavery if they have been indicted as vagrants.

Physician-abolitionist Martin R. Delany, now 47, leads an exploration party to West Africa with a view to studying the Niger Delta as a location for settlement of U.S. blacks (see Douglass, 1847). One of the first blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School, Delany became a leading Pittsburgh physician but moved to Canada 3 years ago in protest against the treatment of blacks like himself in the United States.

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, October 16 stirs passions throughout the country. Abolitionist Brown of 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre fame leads 13 whites and five blacks into Harper's Ferry, they seize the town and its federal arsenal as a signal for a general slave insurrection that will establish a new state as a refuge for blacks, but Frederick Douglas has refused to join in the action, which defies the entire U.S. Army. Federal troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee, supported by U.S. Marines, overpower Brown October 18 after 10 of his men have been killed in a 36-hour standoff (the dead include his two sons); abolitionist Gerrit Smith, now 62, has given Brown a farm in upstate New York and supplied him with funds from time time without knowing that it would be used to mount a raid on a federal arsenal (Smith becomes temporarily insane and is confined for a few weeks in a Utica asylum); Brown, now 59, is convicted of treason and hanged along with seven of his followers December 2 at Charlestown, but "his truth" will go marching on (in the words of a popular song).

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John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry kindled new fires of abolitionist passion.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton inherits $50,000 from her father and founds the National Woman's Suffrage Association (NWSA) May 15 with help from feminists who include Matilda Joslyn Gage, now 33 (see 1848; 1860).