Name that year!
The primary effect of this executive order issued on January 1, 1863, was giving the Union war effort a moral purpose and allowing Black soldiers to enlist.
Emancipation Proclamation
This seaside fortification in Charleston, South Carolina, was the site of the first battle of the Civil War in April 1861.
Battle of Sumter
This region had an industrial economy featuring a vast network of factories, railroads, and growing urban centers.
The North (Union)
Following the withdrawal of federal troops, Southern states enacted these laws to legally enforce racial segregation and systematically strip African Americans of their voting rights.
Jim Crow Laws
She was an escaped enslaved woman who became a famous Union scout, spy, and nurse, and led the Combahee River Raid. Legend surrounds her about knocking out a baby during her time in the Underground Railroad.
Harriet Tubman
This 1857 Supreme Court ruling declared that African Americans were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories.
Dred Scott decision (Scott v Sanford)
Fought on September 17, 1862, this clash remains the bloodiest single day in American history.
Battle of Antietam
This was the primary constitutional reason claimed by Southern states to justify leaving the Union.
States’ Rights (concerning slavery)
This economic system trapped many freedmen in a cycle of debt, as they rented land from former planters and paid them with a portion of the crops they grew.
Sharecropping
He was a runaway slave who became a leading abolitionist orator and advised President Abraham Lincoln on using Black troops.
Frederick Douglass
The immediate political effect of this April 1865 event at Ford's Theatre brought Andrew Johnson to the presidency and disrupted moderate reunification plans.
The Assasination of Abraham Lincoln
This aggressive 1864 military campaign from Atlanta to Savannah destroyed southern infrastructure and helped secure Lincoln's reelection.
Sherman's March to the Sea
This primary Southern diplomatic strategy aimed to force Great Britain and France into recognizing the Confederacy by cutting off their textile supply.
King Cotton Diplomacy
This white supremacist terrorist group was founded in Tennessee in 1865 to use violence and intimidation to prevent freedmen from exercising their political rights.
Ku Klux Klan
This enslaved man sued for his freedom after living in free territory, only for the Supreme Court to rule in 1857 that he was property and not a citizen.
Dred Scott
This amendment granted equal citizenship and due process of law to all persons born or naturalized in the United States.
14th Amendment
This July 1863 engagement marked the turning point of the war and the furthest northern advance of Confederate forces.
Battle of Gettysburg
This 1854 piece of legislation overturned the Missouri Compromise by introducing "popular sovereignty" to the territories, resulting in a localized, violent civil war between pro- and anti-slavery settlers.
The Kansas - Nebraska Act (Bleeding Kansas)
Established in 1865, this federal agency was created to provide food, housing, medical aid, and schooling to emancipated enslaved people and poor whites in the devastated South.
Freedmen’s Bureau
She was a prominent abolitionist, former slave, and women's rights activist famous for her "Ain't I a Woman?" speech.
Sojourner Truth
To maintain a balance of power, this 1820 compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state while drawing a line across the territories banning slavery north of latitude 36°30′.
Missouri Compromise
This crucial Union siege gave the North total control of the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy in two.
Siege of Vicksburg
This pro-slavery ideology, popularized by Southern theorists like John C. Calhoun, argued that slavery was a positive good that civilized Black people and prevented class warfare, contrasting it with the North's exploitative "wage slavery."
“Positive Good” defense of slavery
Northerners who moved to the South during Reconstruction to pursue economic opportunities, political office, or humanitarian work were given this derogatory nickname, inspired by their luggage.
Carpetbaggers
He was a Cherokee Principal Chief who reluctantly allied the Cherokee Nation with the Confederacy early in the war before later shifting loyalties.
John Ross