Antoinette Brown becomes the first female to be ordained a minister in the USA, in the First Congregational Church in South Butler, NY

An anti-slavery movement, formed in the USA to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act, adopts a resonant name, calling itself the Republican party

US inventor Elisha Otis dramatically demonstrates his new safety elevator, cutting the rope suspending his platform in New York's Crystal Palace

The controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act passes into law, enabling citizens of these territories to decide whether or not to allow slavery

US minister to Mexico James Gadsden secures a treaty by which the USA purchases from Mexico much of southern Arizona

Thoreau publishes an account of his two years of self-sufficient transcendentalism in his hut at Walden Pond

The first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is published anonymously, at his own expense, and contains just 12 poems

Longfellow publishes his American Indian epic, The Song of Hiawatha, in an irresistibly catchy metre

Abolitionist John Brown presides over the lynching of five pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie in Kansas

The Haughwout Store, a five-storey building in New York, instals the first Otis safety elevator

An ultra-reactionary Supreme Court judgement in the Dred Scott case heightens US tensions over slavery

John O'Mahony, an Irish emigrant to the USA, founds the Fenian Brotherhood as a secret organization supporting the Irish republican cause

Abraham Linclon comes to national prominence through his debates on slavery with Stephen Douglas, his rival for an Illinois seat in the Senate

Oliver Wendell Holmes' book The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is the first in a breakfast-table series

Longfellow uses a romantic story of early New England for his narrative poem The Courtship of Miles Standish

Edwin L. Drake strikes oil in Pennsylvania, leading to several local oil rushes

John Brown is captured leading a group of abolitionists to seize arms from the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry

Abolitionst John Brown is convicted of treason at Harper's Ferry and is hanged

Mail is carried by horse relay from Missouri to California, travelling 2000 miles in ten days in the service known as the Pony Express

Lincoln becomes the Republican presidential candidate, benefiting from a Democratic party split on the issue of slavery

German immigrants arriving in the USA now outnumber even the Irish

Republican contender Abraham Lincoln is elected US president with only 39% of the popular vote and no electoral votes in eleven southern states

South Carolina becomes the first southern state to secede from the Union in response to Lincoln's election

Seven southern states, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, agree to form the Confederate States of America

The seven members of the newly formed Condederacy elect Jefferson Davis as their provisional president