1857
Indian Rebellion Begins
At Meerut, sepoys alarmed by rumors that new cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat shot their British officers, marched to Delhi, and placed the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah on a throne he had never really held. The Great Revolt had begun. For a year it would look as if the Raj might fall.
Dred Scott Decision
The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Taney, ruled that Dred Scott - an enslaved man who had lived in a free state - was not a citizen and could not sue, that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, and, implicitly, that Black Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The nation recoiled.
Recapture of Delhi
After four months of siege, a mixed British, Sikh, and Gurkha force stormed Delhi at the Kashmiri Gate and fought house to house to the Red Fort. Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal, surrendered; his sons were shot. The city was sacked. Three centuries of Mughal rule over India, already nominal, were finally and formally extinguished.
Cawnpore Massacre
After the surrender of the British garrison at Cawnpore, some two hundred British women and children were hacked to death by the sepoy rebels in the Bibighar, their bodies thrown down a well. The atrocity made reconciliation impossible; the British retribution, when it came, was itself terrible. The Great Revolt had produced its most famous single horror.