|
|
1854 |
|||||||||||
| South America & Caribbean: Pierre Soulé, U. S. Minister to Spain and Virginian John Young Mason, U. S. Minister to France are drafting the Ostend Manifesto, a plan for the American acquisition of Cuba. If Cuba becomes a slave state, Soulé argues, it would avoid an influx of freed slaves and the ³Africanization² of Cuba. | |||||||||||
| North America:The Republican party formed. Kansas-Nebraska Act repeals the Missouri Compromise of 1820, opening Kansas and Nebraska territories as free to settlers despite reservation as Indian lands. White Boston mob protests a returned fugitive slave. Fugitive Slave Act ruled invalid by a Wisconsin Supreme Court. Know-Nothing Party is born in New York to native born protestants who disparage Catholics and immigration. U. S. Mint opens in San Francisco. Astor Library in New York City. Walden by Henry David Thoreau; temperenc drama Ten Nights in a Barroom by Timothy Arthur; Stephen Foster songs are popular. Elgin Treaty signed between the U. S. and Canada. Pennsylvania rock oil is first commercial use of petroleum. Pennsylvania Railroad and B & O Railroad. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas make reputations through railroad business. | |||||||||||
| Europe: Crimean War begins. Florence Nightengale in Crimea, Papal infallibility, Le Figaro in Paris. French diplomat Ferndinand de Lesseps gets concession for Suez Canal. Boolean logic. Hard Times by Dickens; German dictionary by Jacob Grimm; Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson; paintings by Millet, Courbet, Homan Hunt; German composer Schuman attempts suicide and is committed; music by Liszt, Berlioz. | |||||||||||
|
January 1854
|
February 1854
Tragedy strikes a Mardi Gras ball as the balcony of the Theatre d'Orleans collapses, killing several people. |
March 1854
|
April 1854
|
May 1854
|
June 1854
|
July 1854
|
August 1854
|
September 1854
|
October 1854
|
November 1854
|
December 1854
|
| For the second year in a row Yellow Fever rages in the city. 2,500 will die this year. | First private hospital in New Orleans. | First of three horse races between famed Lexington and Lecompte attended by senators, generals and other dignitaries from around the country, including former president Millard Fillmore. Interest in these races rivaled the Robert E. Lee v. Natchez steamboat race. | The railroad comes through Hammond, La. in Tangipahoa Parish, which becomes a shoemaking center for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Town was planned in the 1860s, and by the early twentieth century was known as the Strawberry Capital of America. The original Ponchatoula, La. railroad depot is built by the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern Railroad (later Illinois Central). The depot is burned when Union forces captured town in March 1863. Rebuilt c. 1865. Present depot built in 1894 & remodeled in the 1920s. | San Francisco Plantation house is finished by Edmond B. Marmillion who owned one of the first sugar mills in Louisiana. The floor plan is an early Creole design, but the exterior has Corinthian columns and elaborately carved railings in a Rococco style. It has five hand-painted ceiling frescoes, painted marbling and wood graining. The name is derived from sans frusquin which translates as One's All or my last red cent in French slang at the time, which is what he may have spent to finish the building. Operated by the San Francisco Plantation Foundation, it can be toured for a fee. Charles A. Koch builds St. Emma Plantation house (1854) on Bayou Lafourche. He is also the builder of Belle Alliance plantation and is one of the larger sugar producers in the state at this time, owning more than 300 slaves. |
|||||||
Go to the year 1855 | Go to the year 1855 | ||||||||||