A Nation Divided
Admitting new free or slave states could shift the balance of political power in this branch of government.
What is Congress?
This state became the first to secede after Lincoln’s election in 1860.
What is South Carolina?
Preserving this was Lincoln’s main goal at the beginning of the Civil War.
What is the Union?
This amendment abolished slavery nationwide, except as punishment for a crime after conviction.
What is the Thirteenth Amendment?
These postwar Southern laws restricted Black people’s movement and employment to preserve white control over their labor.
What are Black Codes?
This policy allowed settlers in a territory to decide whether to permit slavery.
What is popular sovereignty?
The Confederate attack on this federal fort turned the secession crisis into war.
What is Fort Sumter?
Lincoln used this two-word description of a household to warn that the nation could not remain permanently half slave and half free.
What is a “house divided”?
A state’s denial of citizenship to a U.S.-born Black resident violated the citizenship provision of this amendment.
What is the Fourteenth Amendment?
This farming system required tenants to give landowners a share of their crops and could trap farmers in debt for supplies.
What is sharecropping?
Violence between proslavery and antislavery settlers after the Kansas-Nebraska Act gave the territory this nickname.
What is “Bleeding Kansas”?
Its larger population, greater industrial production, and extensive railroad network helped this side sustain a long war.
What is the Union?
This proclamation declared enslaved people free in designated areas still in rebellion and made emancipation an explicit Union war goal.
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
A law denying citizens the vote because of race or previous enslavement violated this amendment.
What is the Fifteenth Amendment?
This white supremacist organization used terror against Black voters and their white allies to weaken Republican governments.
What is the Ku Klux Klan?
This Supreme Court decision denied Black Americans citizenship and ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories.
What is the Dred Scott decision?
The Union used this naval strategy to restrict Southern overseas trade and access to supplies.
What is a blockade?
These slaveholding states remained loyal to the Union and were excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation.
What are the border states?
This federal agency supported schools and helped formerly enslaved people negotiate labor agreements.
What is the Freedmen’s Bureau?
Federal troop withdrawal associated with this 1877 political settlement weakened enforcement of Black rights in the South.
What is the Compromise of 1877?
Lincoln opposed this spread of slavery, rather than proposing its immediate abolition in states where it already existed.
What is slavery’s expansion into western territories?
These two Union victories in July 1863 stopped Lee’s northern invasion and secured control of the Mississippi River.
What are Gettysburg and Vicksburg?
This speech connected the sacrifices of the Civil War to equality, a “new birth of freedom,” and the survival of democratic government.
What is the Gettysburg Address?
This 1867 law placed most former Confederate states under military oversight and required political reforms before readmission.
What is the Reconstruction Act of 1867?
These segregation laws undermined racial equality even though the Reconstruction Amendments remained in the Constitution.
What are Jim Crow laws?