1830
Indian Removal Act
President Jackson signed a bill authorizing the forced relocation of eastern tribes west of the Mississippi. The Supreme Court ruled against it; Jackson ignored the Court. Over the next decade the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole would be marched west on what survivors remembered as the Trail of Tears.
France Takes Algiers
Using the flimsy pretext of the dey's having struck a French consul with a fly-whisk, Charles X landed an army on the Algerian coast and captured the city in three weeks. It was meant to prop up a failing king. It founded a colonial empire instead, and began a hundred and thirty years of bloody French presence in North Africa.
July Revolution
Three days of Parisian barricades - "les trois glorieuses" - overthrew Charles X and the older Bourbon line for good. Louis-Philippe, the "citizen king," was installed by bankers and newspapermen. Delacroix painted a bare-breasted Liberty leading the people. It was the first successful revolution since 1789, and a template for 1848.
Belgian Revolution
An opera about a Neapolitan uprising ended, the audience poured into the Brussels streets, and by morning Belgium was in revolt against its Dutch king. The great powers, eager to avoid wider war, recognized the new kingdom. Little Belgium's neutrality, guaranteed by treaty in 1839, would be the "scrap of paper" of 1914.
Great Trek Looms
Disaffected Afrikaner farmers in the British Cape, angry at the end of slavery and English magistrates, began gathering the wagons and oxen for a mass migration inland. Within five years they would trek north into Zulu and Ndebele country, carrying their Bibles, their rifles, and their quarrel with the empire.
November Uprising in Poland
A group of cadets at the Warsaw military academy attacked the Belvedere palace, intending to assassinate the Russian Grand Duke. The assassination failed but the rising caught. For nearly a year the Polish Congress Kingdom fought Russia; in September 1831 Warsaw fell, and Nicholas I abolished what remained of Polish autonomy.