Vocabulary
The formal, official act of withdrawing from a larger group, organization, alliance, or political state?
What is Secession
This moral, economic, and social institution was the ultimate root cause of the Civil War, tearing the nation apart over its expansion into the West.
What is Slavery?
The 1820 law passed by the U.S. Congress to keep an equal balance of power in the Senate between free states and slave states?
What is the Missouri Compromise?
This three-day July 1863 battle in Pennsylvania was the costliest of the war and crushed General Robert E. Lee's final attempt to invade the North.
What is the Battle of Gettysburg?
The 16th President of the United States who led the Union through the war and issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Who is Abraham Lincoln?
A person who believed in ending slavery in the United States?
What is an Abolitionist
The election of this 16th U.S. President served as the final straw for the South, triggering immediate secession before he even took office.
What is Abraham Lincoln?
The group of five laws passed in September 1850 to settle arguments over slavery in new western lands.
What is The Compromise of 1850?
This grueling 1863 siege ended a day after Gettysburg, giving the Union complete control of the Mississippi River and successfully splitting the Confederacy in two.
What is the Siege of Vicksburg?
The top Union general who accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox and later became the 18th U.S. President.
Who is Ulysses S. Grant?
The secret network of routes, safe houses, and people that helped enslaved individuals in the American South escape to freedom in the Northern United States and Canada
What is the Underground Railroad
Proponents of this political doctrine argued that individual states kept their sovereignty and could legally ignore federal laws or even leave the Union.
What is State's Rights?
The law that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and allowed settlers to decide the status of slavery through popular sovereignty
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
The very first shots of the American Civil War were fired in April 1861 at this island fortification in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
What is the Battle of Fort Sumter?
The brilliant commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
Who is Robert E. Lee?
The idea that the power of a government comes from the people who live there
Fueled by a booming factory system in the North and a plantation-based economy in the South, this "ism" describes the intense loyalty to one's own region over the country as a whole.
What is the Sectionalism?
The executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, that declared millions of enslaved people in rebelling Confederate states to be free
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
This July 1861 battle earned Thomas Jackson the nickname Stonewall and a Confederate victory here proved the war would be long and bloody.
What is the Battle of Bull Run?
A legendary Confederate general known for his steadfast defense at the First Battle of Bull Run
Who is Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson?
The short speech delivered by President Lincoln on November 19, 1863 which honored fallen soldiers while saying the American Civil War as a crucial test of human equality, democracy, and national survival.
What is the Gettysburg Address
This controversial 1854 act overturned the Missouri Compromise, allowed "popular sovereignty," and led to a violent, bloody preview of the Civil War in a midwestern territory.
What is The Kansas-Nebraska Act?
The decision that made it so black people were property and not citizens and could not sue for their freedom.
What is the Dredd Scott Decision?
Fought in Maryland in September 1862, this clash remains the single bloodiest day in U.S. military history and gave Lincoln the political victory needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
What is the Battle of Antietam?
The first and only president of the Confederate States of America during the conflict.