March 4, 1857 - James Buchanan sworn in as 15th U. S. President.

March 6, 1857 - Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. Seven of the nine justices agreed that Dred Scott should remain a slave, but Taney did not stop there. He also ruled that as a slave, Dred Scott was not a citizen of the United States, and therefore had no right to bring suit in the federal courts on any matter. In addition, he declared that Scott had never been free, due to the fact that slaves were personal property; thus the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, and the Federal Government had no right to prohibit slavery in the new territories. The court appeared to be sanctioning slavery under the terms of the Constitution itself, and saying that slavery could not be outlawed or restricted within the United States. The American public reacted very strongly to the Dred Scott Decision. Antislavery groups feared that slavery would spread unchecked. The new Republican Party, founded in 1854 to prohibit the spread of slavery, renewed its fight to gain control of Congress and the courts. Its well-planned political campaign of 1860, coupled with divisive issues that split the Democratic Party, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States and South Carolina's secession from the Union. The Dred Scott Decision moved the country to the brink of Civil War.

August 24, 1857 - The New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company closed, plunged America into the Panic of 1857; had loaned $5 million to railroad builders, and had been swindled out of millions more by manager of its New York branch. Unable to pay its extensive debt to Eastern bankers, Ohio Life was forced into bankruptcy. New York bankers began to panic for fear that they would not be able to meet their financial obligations, and shifted suddenly to hard credit policies. They demanded immediate payment on all mature loans, refusing to accept promissory notes from merchants and other debtors who were short on money. Depositors began to withdraw gold from banks, dropping gold reserves by $20 million by mid-September. September 12 -  Hopes for gold from California sank when the steamer Central America, with its $1.6 million in gold and 400 passengers, was lost at sea in a hurricane. banks suspended gold payments, stocks plummeted, and thousands of businesses, including half of New York City’s brokerages, went bankrupt. People crowded around bulletin boards outside newspaper offices to read the daily updates of suspended banks and failed businesses. Banks in Philadelphia and other American cities soon suspended gold payments, as well. The collapse of credit halted construction of buildings and railroads, and reduced the nation’s trade to a trickle. Unemployment in the Northeast and Midwest skyrocketed, with an estimated 100,000 in Manhattan and Brooklyn out of work by late October. By December - the loss from business failures in New York City alone was $120 million. The economic repercussions spread to Europe and South America, and immigration to the United States dropped substantially. Panic of 1857 served to widen the gap that already existed between the economic interests of the North and South.

Panic of 1857 caused by: 1) European demand for American grain crops fell drastically as end of Crimean War reopened Western European markets to Russian grains; 2) bumper crops produced glut of agricultural goods, lower prices, less profits for American farmers, many of whom were in debt to Eastern merchants and bankers; 3) United States was running a trade imbalance with foreign nations, (excess of imports over exports  meant that) gold was being drained from the country; 4) banks raised interest rates (during the summer of 1857) as they desperately sought to build up their gold reserves; 5) much of the investment in railroads and land was speculative, based on credit, and not expected to be profitable for years.

November 5, 1857 - 4000 rallied at Tompkins Square to listen to speakers demand that the city government establish more public works to hire the unemployed, guarantee a minimum wage, build housing for the poor, and prevent landlords from evicting the unemployed. The next day, 5000 marched to Merchants’ Exchange on Wall Street to call on the city’s financial institutions to loan businesses money so the unemployed could be hired. On November 9 - an even larger crowd gathered at City Hall. At the insistence of Mayor Fernando Wood, a mass meeting at City Hall the next day was met by 300 city police and a brigade of state militia, while federal troops under General Winfield Scott guarded the federal sub-treasury and customhouse.

December 31, 1857 - Britain's Queen Victoria decided to make Ottawa the capital of Canada.

May 11, 1858 - Minnesota enters the Union as the 32nd state. 1820 - Fort Snelling established (eventually Minneapolis and St. Paul), white settlement of the area began. 1849 - became a U.S. territory. 1857 - population swelled from only 6,000 in 1850 to more than 150,000.

June 16, 1858 - Newly nominated senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln addresses the Illinois Republican Convention in Springfield and warns that the nation faces a crisis (slavery) that could destroy the Union. Speaking to more than 1,000 delegates in an ominous tone, Lincoln paraphrased a passage from the New Testament: "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Lincoln lost the close Senate race of 1858 to the more moderate Stephen Douglas, who advocated states’ sovereignty. Lincoln’s eloquent speech, though, earned him national attention and his strong showing in the polls encouraged the people to back his ultimately successful bid for the presidency in 1860.

July 28, 1858 - William Herschel first used fingerprints as a means of identification; later established a fingerprint register.

August 16, 1858 - A telegraphed message from Britain's Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan was transmitted over the recently laid trans-Atlantic cable. Her message to President Buchanan, in Washington DC, began transmission at 10:50am and was completed at 4:30am the next day, taking nearly 18-hrs to reach Newfoundland. With 99 words, consisting of 509 letters, it averaged about 2-minutes per letter. The message was forwarded across Newfoundland by an overhead wire supported on poles; across Cabot Strait by submarine cable to Aspy Bay (Dingwall), Cape Breton; and by an overhead wire across eastern Canada and Maine, via Boston to New York. This earliest Transatlantic cable went dead within a month.

August 21, 1858 - Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Abraham Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and one-time U.S. representative from Illinois, begin a series of famous public encounters on the issue of slavery. The two politicians, the former a Northern Democrat and the latter a Republican, were competing for Douglas' U.S. Senate seat. In the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates--all about three hours along--Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or slave. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party.

October 29, 1858 - Tthe first store opens in a small frontier town in Colorado Territory that a month later will take the name of Denver in a shameless ploy to curry favor with Kansas Territorial Governor James W. Denver. The brainchild of a town promoter and real estate salesman from Kansas named William H. Larimer Jr., Denver and its first store were created to serve the miners working the placer gold deposits  discovered a year before at the confluence of Cheery Creek and the South Platte River. By 1859 - tens of thousands of gold seekers had flooded into the area, but by then the placer deposits were already playing out and most miners quickly departed for home or headed west into the mountains in search of richer lodes. 1870 - Denver began to overcome its geographical isolation with t he arrival of the Kansas Pacific Railroad from the East and the completion of th e 105-mile Denver Pacific Railway joining Denver to the Union Pacific line at Cheyenne. Other lines began to connect Denver to the booming mining regions in the Rockies, and by the mid-1870s, the city was thriving as a railroad hub and center of the western mining industry. By 1890 - Denver had a population of more than 106,000, making it the 26th largest urban area in the nation and earning it the nickname, the "Queen City of the Plains." However , the Silver Panic of 1893 brought the boom to an abrupt end, though it was partially revived a year later by the gold discoveries on Cripple Creek. Although t he growing significance of farming and ranching helped moderate its ups and down s by decreasing the city's dependency on mining, this cyclical pattern of economic boom and bust would continue to dominate Denver, and many other western cities, throughout much of the 20th century.

February 14, 1859 - Oregon was admitted to the Union as the 33rd state.

April 25, 1859 - At Port Said, Egypt, ground is broken for the Suez Canal, an artificial waterway intended to stretch 101 miles across the isthmus of Suez and connect the Mediterranean and the Red seas. 1856 - the Suez Canal Company was formed and granted the right to operate the canal for 99 years. November 17, 1869 - the Suez Canal was officially inaugurated in anelaborate ceremony attended by French Empress Eugýnie, wife of Napoleon III. When it opened, the Suez Canal was only 25 feet deep, 72 feet wide at the bottom, and 200 to 300 feet wide at the surface. Consequently, fewer than 500 ships navigated it in its first full year of operation. 1875 - Great Britain became the largest shareholder in the Suez Canal Company when it bought up the stock of the new Ottoman governor of Egypt;  1882 - Britain invaded Egypt, beginning a long occupation of the country. July 1956 - Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal, hoping to charge tolls that would pay for construction of a massive dam on the Nile River.

May 31, 1859 - Tower clock known as Big Ben, located at the top of the 320-foot-high St. Stephen's Tower, rings out over the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, for the first time; October 1834 - Palace of Westminster, the headquarters of the British Parliament, destroyed by fire. Designed by Edmund Beckett Denison, a formidable barrister; built by the company E.J. Dent & Co., completed in 1854; clock's faces 23 feet across.

October 16, 1859 - Abolitionist John Brown led a group of about 20 men in a raid on Harper's Ferry. The wounded Brown was tried by the state of Virginia for treason and murder, and he was found guilty on November 2. December 2, 1859 - He went to the gallows. Before his execution, he handed his guard a slip of paper that read, "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." It was a prophetic statement. Although the raid failed, it inflamed sectional tensions and raised the stakes for the 1860 presidential election. Brown's raid helped make any further accommodation between North and South nearly impossible and thus became an important impetus of the Civil War.

February 27, 1860 - President Abraham Lincoln poses for the first of several portraits by noted Civil War-era photographer Mathew Brady. Days later, the photograph is published on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar with the caption, "Hon. Abram [sic] Lincoln, of Illinois, Republican Candidate for President"; showed an unusually beardless Lincoln just moments before he delivered an address at Cooper Union in which he articulated his reasons for opposing slavery in the new territories, received wild applause and garnered strong support for his candidacy among New Yorkers; Lincoln later claimed that "Mr. Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president"; 1843 - John Quincy Adams first presidential candidate, or president, to be photographed.

April 2, 1860 - The first Italian Parliament met at Turin.

May 18, 1860 - On third day of the convention in Chicago, nominations were presented. The third ballot gave Abraham Lincoln of Illinois 231 1/2 votes, with 233 necessary for nomination. At this point the Ohio delegation changed its four votes from Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln was nominated. 

June 23, 1860 - Congress establishes Government Printing Office.

October 15, 1860 - Eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, NY, wrote a letter to presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, suggested he could improve his appearance by growing a beard.

October 18, 1860 - British troops occupying Peking, China, loot and then burn the Yuanmingyuan, the fabulous summer residence built by the Manchu emperors in the 18th century. China's Qing leadership surrendered to the Franco-British expeditionary force soon after, ending the Second Opium War and Chinese hopes of reversing the tide of foreign domination in its national affairs. In 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, the palace was burned again by Western troops, and it remained dilapidated until the Chinese Communists rebuilt it in the 1950s.

October 26, 1860 - Italian unification leader Giuseppe Garibaldi proclaimed Victor Emmanuel King of Italy.

November 6, 1860 - Former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln defeated three other candidates for the United States presidency (Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Vice-President); first Republican president.

December 8, 1860 - Howell Cobb resigned his post as Secretary of the Treasury in anger over Lincoln's election victory. Secession-minded politician from Georgia became a leader in the Confederacy movement and later served as a major general in the Southern army.

February 4, 1861 - In Montgomery, Alabama, delegates from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana convene to establish the Confederate States of America; It took just four days to hammer out a tentative document to govern the new nation. The president was limited to one six-year term. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the word "slave" was used and the institution protected in all states and any territories to be added later. Importation of slaves was prohibited, as this would alienate European nations and would detract from the profitable "internal slave trade" in the South. Other components of the constitution were designed to enhance the power of the states--governmental money for internal improvements was banned and the president was given a line-item veto on appropriations bills. February 9,1861 - Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate who was the U.S. Secretary of War in the 1850s and a senator from Mississippi, was elected the Confederacy's first president.

February 11, 1861 - President-elect Abraham Lincoln departed Springfield, IL, for Washington; boarded a two-car private train loaded with his family's belongings, which he himself had packed and bound. Mary Lincoln was in St. Louis on a shopping trip, and she joined him later in Indiana; spoke to the crowd before departing: "Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young man to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being...I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail...To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

February 13, 1861 - Colonel Bernard J.D. Irwin, an assistant army surgeon serving in the first major U.S.-Apache conflict, performs earliest military action to be revered with a Medal of Honor award; volunteered to rescue of Second Lieutenant George N. Bascom, who was trapped with 60 men of the U.S. Seventh Infantry by the Chiricahua Apaches; began the 100-mile trek to Bascom's forces riding on mules; reached Bascom's forces on February 14 and proved instrumental in breaking the siege; 1862 - award created; January 21, 1894 - Irwin received the nation's highest military honor.

February 18, 1861 - Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, AL.

February 23, 1861 - President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington to take office after an assassination plot was foiled in Baltimore; seven states having already seceded from the Union since Lincoln's election.

March 2, 1861 - Patent Act of 1861 increased term of a patent grant from 14 to 17 years.

Jean H. Baker (2004). James Buchanan. (New York, NY: Times Books, 172 p.). Professor of History (Goucher College). Buchanan, James, 1791-1868; Presidents--United States--Biography; United States--Politics and government--1857-1861. Weak leadership in a time of national crisis; man who, when given the opportunity, failed to rise to the challenge.

Frederick Moore Binder (1994). James Buchanan and the American Empire. (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 318 p.). Buchanan, James, 1791-1868; Presidents--United States--Biography; United States--Foreign relations--1815-1861.

Ed. Michael J. Birkner (1996). James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s. (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 215 p.). Buchanan, James, 1791-1868; United States--Politics and government--1857-1861.

Philip S. Klein (1962). President James Buchanan, A Biography. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 506 p.). Buchanan, James, 1791-1868.

Elbert B. Smith (1975). The Presidency of James Buchanan. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 225 p.). Buchanan, James, 1791-1868; United States--Politics and government--1857-1861.

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LINKS

Conservation of the Dred Scott Papers http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/localrecs/conservation/ dredscott/intro.asp  Description of the conservation of papers from the case in which "Dred Scott petitioned the St. Louis Circuit Court for his freedom in April 1846." The case, which eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was decided on March 6, 1857, "brought the country to the brink of civil war." Includes many images showing the conservation process. From the Archives division of the Missouri Secretary of State.