Civil War Flashcards
Missouri Compromise
An effort by Congress to defuse the sectional and political rivalries triggered by the request of Missouri late in 1819 for admission as a state in which slavery would be permitted. At the time, the United States contained twenty-two states, evenly divided between slave and free.
Compromise of 1850
A package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850, which defused a four-year political confrontation between slave and free states regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848).
Kansas-Nebraska Act/popular sovereignty
Allowed settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders. Proposed by Stephen A. Douglas–Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the influential Lincoln-Douglas debates–the bill overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory.
Dred Scott Decision
Affirmed the right of slave owners to take their slaves into the Western territories, thereby negating the doctrine of popular sovereignty and severely undermining the platform of the newly created Republican Party. Showing the racism the federal courts had against African Americans.
Lincoln’s election
Became he 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois. 7 states seceded by the time he was inaugurated.
Advantages of the Union
Had industrial power making manufacturing weapons and gear much faster and cheaper with a larger overall population.
Advantages of the Confederacy
Great leaders/generals such as Robert E. Lee along with agricultural making lots of money selling cotton to Britain and France.
Antietam
George McClellan mounted a series of powerful assaults against Robert E. Lee’s forces near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862. The bloodiest single day in American military history ended in a draw, but the Confederate retreat gave Abraham Lincoln the “victory” he desired before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln freed all the southern slaves with the strategic plan to weaken the south’s work force along with the moral plan to free the mistreated slaves (Issued on January 1, 1863).
Roles of African Americans in the war
4.5 million, some 180,000 African Americans served in 163 units for the Union army as well as surely thousands more in the Navy. Along with the confederacy starting to enlist African slaves.
Gettysburg
Fought on July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is often described as the war’s turning point.
Gettysburg Address
Speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863 which reiterated the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the Civil War as a struggle for the preservation of the Union sundered by the secession crisis,with “a new birth of freedom” that would bring true equality to all of its citizens. Lincoln also redefined the Civil War as a struggle not just for the Union, but also for the principle of human equality.
Appomattox
The signing of the surrender documents occurred in the parlor of the house owned by Wilmer McLean on the afternoon of April 9th.
Reconstruction – Presidential vs. Congressional Reconstruction
Lincoln proposed the Ten-Percent Plan while congress wanted to make the southern states pay for seceding.
Sharecropping
System of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land.
