WHO AM I?
"Among the witnesses to my execution for treason in December 1859 was a young actor named John Wilkes Booth — who would himself become infamous exactly six years later. I went to the gallows certain that history would prove me right."
Who is John Brown?
The assassin chose this location partly because he performed there regularly and knew every corridor and exit. The president's bodyguard had stepped away. The play on stage was called "Our American Cousin."
What is Ford's Theatre?
Jefferson Davis called it a constitutional right. Abraham Lincoln called it an illegal rebellion with no basis in law. South Carolina did it first in December 1860, and ten more states followed before the shooting started.
What is secession?
Critics called it hollow — it only freed people in places where the Union had no power to enforce it. But Lincoln knew that was the point: it reframed the entire war as a fight over slavery, not just union, and slammed shut any door to European support for the Confederacy.
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
He won the presidency without carrying a single Southern state — and before he had even taken office, seven states had already passed resolutions to leave the Union.
Who is Abraham Lincoln?
"The reward for my capture grew to $40,000 — the equivalent of more than a million dollars today. I was never caught. Neither was a single person I brought north. Not one."
Who is Harriet Tubman?
On its third and final day, 12,500 Confederate soldiers marched across a mile of open fields toward Union lines in what became known as the "high-water mark of the Confederacy." The tide turned here — and it never came back.
What is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania?
In 1860 Boston it was a badge of honor. In 1860 Charleston it was practically a death sentence. The word described anyone who believed slavery was not just wrong, but had to be completely and immediately eliminated.
What is an abolitionist?
Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that this man's years living in a free state had not made him free — and that his race gave him no standing to bring a case before any American court. The year was 1857. Much of the North was appalled.
What is the Dred Scott Decision?
After 1854 opened Kansas and Nebraska to a popular vote on slavery, pro-slavery "border ruffians" crossed from Missouri to stuff ballot boxes. Anti-slavery settlers responded with rifles. The territory's grim nickname came from what followed.
What is Bleeding Kansas?
"I proved my oppressors wrong every time I opened my mouth. My 1845 memoir was so articulate that some accused me of fabricating it — surely no enslaved man, they said, could have written such a thing."
Who is Frederick Douglass?
When Confederate guns opened fire here in April 1861, the Union garrison ran out of ammunition and surrendered without a single combat death. Within 48 hours, 75,000 men across the North had volunteered to fight.
What is Fort Sumter?
Their nickname implied they arrived with everything they owned stuffed into a single cheap bag — and stayed long enough to fill it with political appointments, land deals, and government contracts during the chaos of Reconstruction.
What is a carpetbagger?
They criminalized unemployment, required year-long labor contracts, and in some states allowed courts to "hire out" a convicted freedman to a white employer. They were written after the 13th Amendment — and they were designed to make it meaningless.
What are Black Codes?
** DAILY DOUBLE**
It fed the displaced, built schools, and tried to negotiate fair wages — but it was chronically underfunded, openly sabotaged by President Andrew Johnson, and shut down in 1872, decades before its work was anywhere near finished.
What is the Freedmen's Bureau?
"A powerful statesman reportedly told me I was 'the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.' I never set foot in the South — but I made millions of Northerners see it through the eyes of those who suffered there."
Who is Harriet Beecher Stowe?
The terms signed here were so generous — soldiers could keep their horses, officers their sidearms — that the Union general ordered his men not to fire celebratory salutes. "The rebels," he said, "are our countrymen again."
What is Appomattox Court House?
It is what happens when a senator from Virginia cares more about protecting Virginia than about what is good for the United States — when region beats nation, every single time. It was tearing the country apart long before the first shot was fired.
What is sectionalism?
It took until December 1865 — eight months after Lee's surrender — for enough states to ratify it. Only then did it do constitutionally what Lincoln had only been able to accomplish through executive order during the war.
What is the 13th Amendment?
General Winfield Scott proposed it early in the war and the press mocked it as too slow. By 1863, its two components — a naval blockade and control of the Mississippi River — were quietly strangling the Confederate economy to death.
What is the Anaconda Plan?
"President Lincoln offered me command of the entire Union army. I declined. Within days, I had accepted command of the force that would fight against it — because I could not, I said, raise my hand against my native state."
Who is Robert E. Lee?
This small Virginia town was the site of an 1859 raid specifically because it was home to a federal arsenal — the weapons cache planned to be seized and used to arm enslaved people for a massive uprising.
What is Harpers Ferry?
At the center of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 was this idea — that Congress had no business deciding slavery's fate in new territories, and that the settlers moving there should cast the deciding votes themselves.
What is popular sovereignty?
For 34 years it kept an uneasy peace by balancing every new slave state with a new free state. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 tore it apart — and the country's fragile equilibrium began its final collapse.
What is the Missouri Compromise?
Its equal protection clause would be debated in courts for the next century and beyond — but in 1868, its immediate purpose was more urgent: to make citizens of the four million people the previous amendment had just freed.
What is the 14th Amendment?