Timeline of African-American Civil Rights Movement - 18th Century

18th Century

See also: Atlantic slave trade

1705

• The Virginia Slave codes defines as slaves all those servants brought into the colony who were not Christian in their original countries, as well as those Indians sold to colonists by other Indians.

1712

• April 6 – The New York Slave Revolt of 1712, one of the first of many such rebellions (see the article).

1739

• September 9 – In the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina slaves gather at the Stono River to plan an armed march for freedom.

1760

• Jupiter Hammon has a poem printed, becoming the first published African-American poet.

1770

• March 5 – Crispus Attucks is killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, a precursor to the American Revolution.

1773

• Phillis Wheatley has her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral published.

1774

• – The first black Baptist congregations are organized in the South: Silver Bluff Baptist Church in South Carolina, and First African Baptist Church near Petersburg, Virginia.

1775

• April 14 – The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully held in Bondage holds four meetings. Re-formed in 1784 as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Benjamin Franklin would later be its president.

1776–1783 American Revolution

• Thousands of enslaved African Americans in the South escape to British or Loyalist lines, as they were promised freedom if they fought with the British. In South Carolina, 25,000 enslaved African Americans, one-quarter of those held, escape to the British. After the war, many African Americans leave with the British for England; others go with other Loyalists to Canada and settle in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Still others go to Jamaica and the West Indies.
• Many free blacks in the North fight with the colonists for the rebellion.

1777

• July 8 – The Vermont Republic (a sovereign nation at the time) abolishes slavery, the first future state to do so.

1780

• Pennsylvania becomes the first then-U.S.-state to abolish slavery.

1787

• July 13 – The Northwest Ordinance bans the expansion of slavery into U.S. territories north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River.

1788

• – The First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia is organized under Andrew Bryan.

1790–1810 Manumission of slaves

• – Following the Revolution, numerous slaveholders in the Upper South free their slaves; the percentage of free blacks rises from less than one to 10 percent. By 1810, 75 percent of all blacks in Delaware are free, and 7.2 percent of blacks in Virginia are free.

1791

• February – Major Andrew Ellicott hires Benjamin Banneker to assist in a survey of the boundaries of the 100-square-mile (260 km2) federal district that would later become the District of Columbia.

1793

• February 12 – The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 is passed. (See also Fugitive slave laws.)

1794

• March 14 – Eli Whitney is granted a patent on the cotton gin. This enables the widespread cultivation and processing of short-staple cotton, dramatically increasing the need for enslaved labor, and leading to the development of King Cotton in the Deep South. It leads to the forced migration of one million slaves to the area in the antebellum period, mostly by internal slave trade.
• July – Two independent black churches open in Philadelphia: the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, with Absalom Jones, and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, with Richard Allen, the first church of what would become a new black denomination in 1816.