Road to Civil War
Harriet Beecher Stowe's widely read novel that dramatized the horrors of slavery.
What is Uncle Tom's Cabin?
Allowed Missouri to enter as a slave state but preserved the balance between North and South by carving free-soil Maine out of Massachusetts and prohibiting slavery from territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, north of the line of 36°30′.
What is the Missouri Compromise?
Civil War battle in Pennsylvania that ended in Union victory, spelling doom for the Confederacy, which never again managed to invade the North. Site of General George Pickett’s daring but doomed charge on the Northern lines.
What is the Battle of Gettysburg?
Declared all slaves in rebelling states to be free but did not affect slavery in nonrebelling Border States. The proclamation closed the door on possible compromise with the South and encouraged thousands of Southern slaves to flee to Union lines.
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
Officially ended Reconstruction returning the Southern States to white-only, Democratic-dominated electoral politics.
What is Compromise of 1877?
Antislavery party in the 1848 and 1852 elections that opposed the extension of slavery into the territories, arguing that the presence of slavery could limit opportunities for free laborers.
Passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, it set high penalties for anyone who aided escaped slaves and compelled all law enforcement officers to participate in retrieving runaways. Strengthened the antislavery cause in the North.
What is the Fugitive Slave Act?
Two-and-a-half-month siege of a Confederate fort on the Mississippi River in Tennessee. Vicksburg finally fell to Ulysses S. Grant in July of 1863, giving the Union army control of the Mississippi River and splitting the South in two.
What is the Siege of Vicksburg?
Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s destructive march through Georgia. An early instance of “total war,” purposely targeting infrastructure and civilian property to diminish morale and undercut the Confederate war effort.
What is Sherman's March to the Sea?
Created to aid newly emancipated slaves by providing food, clothing, medical care, education, and legal support. Its achievements were uneven and depended largely on the quality of local administrators.
What is Freedman's Bureau?
Amendment that sought to prohibit slavery from territories acquired from Mexico.
What is the Wilmot Proviso?
Proposed that the issue of slavery be decided by popular sovereignty in the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, thus revoking the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Introduced by Stephen Douglas in an effort to bring Nebraska into the Union and pave the way for a northern transcontinental railroad.
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
First major battle of the Civil War and a victory for the South, it dispelled Northern illusions of swift victory.
What is the First Battle of Bull Run?
Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865 after almost a year of brutal fighting throughout Virginia in the “Wilderness Campaign.”
What is the Surrender at Appomattox?
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state where in they reside".
What is the fourteenth Amendment?
Admitted California as a free state, opened New Mexico and Utah to popular sovereignty, ended one slave trade(but not slavery itself) in Washington D.C., and introduced a more stringent fugitive slave law.
What is the Compromise of 1850?
Series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the U.S. Senate race in Illinois. Douglas won the election, but Lincoln gained national prominence and emerged as the leading candidate for the 1860 Republican nomination.
What are the Lincoln-Douglas debates?
On November 29, 1864, militia under the command of John C. Chivington assaulted a Cheyenne village in southeastern Colorado Territory. Initially hailed as a military triumph, it was later found that Chivington’s men had attacked the village without provocation, killing over one hundred women and children.
What is the Sand Creek Massacre?
Shot in the head by confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.
What is Lincoln's Assassination?
Constitutional amendment prohibiting all forms of slavery and involuntary servitude. Former Confederate states were required to ratify the amendment prior to gaining reentry into the Union.
What is the 13th Amendment?
Supreme court decision that extended federal protection to slavery by ruling that congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in any territory.
What is Dred Scott v. Sandford?
Federal arsenal in Virginia seized by abolitionist John Brown in 1859. Though Brown was later captured and executed, his raid alarmed southerners, who believed that northerners shared in Brown’s extremism.
What is Harpers Ferry?
Civil war in Kansas over the issue of slavery in the territory, fought intermittently until 1861, when it merged with the wider national Civil War.
What is Bleeding Kansas?
Landmark battle in the Civil War that essentially ended in a draw but demonstrated the prowess of the Union army, forestalling foreign intervention and giving Lincoln the “victory” he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
What is the Battle of Antietam?
Prohibited states from denying citizens the franchise on account of race. It disappointed feminists, who wanted the amendment to include guarantees for women’s suffrage.
What is the fifteenth Amendment?