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

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

Lagos, on the coast of Nigeria, is annexed as a British colony when the royal family prove unable or unwilling to end the slave trade

Lincoln declares in his Emancipation Proclamation that all slaves in any state opposing the Union government 'are and henceforward shall be free'

Lincoln visits the Confederate capital at Richmond and is greeted by a jubilant crowd of freed slaves

The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits slavery or any 'involuntary servitude' in the USA

The British consul in Zanzibar persuades the sultan to end the island's notorious slave trade

Slavery is finally made illegal in the Portuguese empire

Scottish missionaries establish Blantyre (named after Livingstone's birthplace) as a centre from which to fight slavery

The Ten Years' War ends in Cuba, with Spain promising extensive reforms including the abolition of slavery

Booker T. Washington, freed at the end of the Civil War, heads a college in the south, in Tuskegee, Alabama, to educate former slaves

The emperor Pedro II frees all the remaining slaves in Brazil without compensating their owners