Civil War & Reconstruction

• Missouri Compromise, 1820

  Admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Declared that all territory north of 36 ° 30" would become free states, and all territory south of that latitude would become slave states.
• Compromise of 1850

  •Admitted California as a free state

  •Organized Utah and N.M. without restrictions on slavery 

  •Adjusted the Texas/N.M. border

  •Abolished slave trade in D.C. 

  •Established tougher fugitive slave laws. 

  •Its passage was hailed as a solution to the threat of national division.
• Henry Clay


  Clay helped heal the North/South rift by aiding passage of the Compromise of 1850, which served to delay the Civil War.
• Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854


  This act repealed the Missouri Compromise. Popular sovereignty (vote of the people) would determine whether Kansas and Nebraska would be slave or free states.
• Bleeding Kansas


  Name given to the Kansas Territory in the years before the Civil War, when the territory was a battleground between proslavery and anti-slavery forces.
• Abolitionist Movement


  The movement in America to outlaw slavery which was made up of whites and African–Americans. Its leaders included: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Tubman.
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin

  A best-selling novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852, that portrayed slavery as a great moral evil and helped to grow the Abolitionist Movement in America.
• Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857

  A Missouri slave sued for his freedom, claiming that his four year stay in free land had made him a free man. The U.S. Supreme Court decided he could not sue in federal court because he was property, not a citizen.
• Causes of Secession, 1860


  After Lincoln was elected, seven Southern states seceded. They cited as their reason for seceding the election of a President “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”
• Resources of the North & South

  The North:

  Factories, Railroad tracks, Telegraph wires, Labor force.

  The South:

  Plantations, Slaves,

  Cotton, Rivers.
• Anaconda Plan

  • Three part 1862 Union war strategy to defeat the South:

  1. Blockade Southern ports.

  2. Cut the Mississippi River in half.

  3. Capture Richmond.
• Battle of Gettysburg, 1863


  90,000 soldiers under Meade vs. 76,000 under Lee, lasted three days and the North won. Considered a turning point of the Civil War.
• The Battle Hymn of the Republic

  Abolitionist & poet Julia Ward Howe in 1861 composed these lyrics toward the cause of ending slavery. When Lincoln first heard the song he cried out as tears rolled down his face “sing it again! Sing it again!”
• Native Americans in the Civil War

  The North & the South both courted Native American tribes during the Civil War. While tribes like the Cheyenne supported the North, the Creeks & Choctaws supported the South. 

  The Cherokee were divided within itself over who to support.
• Emancipation Proclamation, 1862


  Lincoln freed all slaves in states that had seceded. Lincoln had no power to enforce the law.
• Reconstruction Plans

  Presidential Plans

  • Lincoln offered the “Ten Percent Plan.”

  • Johnson’s plan was similar to Lincoln’s, but required wealthy planters to request pardons and did not support voting rights for African-Americans.
• Reconstruction Plans

  Congressional Plan

  • “Radical Republicans” passed the Wade-Davis Bill. Lincoln pocket vetoed the bill.

  • Established Freedmen’s Bureau and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
• Civil War Amendments

  • 13th - Freed all slaves, abolished slavery. 

  • 14th - It granted full citizenship to all native-born or naturalized Americans, including former slaves and immigrants. No state shall deny a person life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

  • 15th - No one could be denied the right to vote on account of race, color or having been a slave. It was to prevent states from amending their constitutions to deny black suffrage.
• Civil Rights Act of 1866


  Prohibited abridgement of rights of blacks or any other citizens.
• Black Codes

  In order to restore the “old” ways Southern states passed these codes that:

  1. Limited African-American occupations to that of servants & farm laborers.
  2. In some states African-Americans were prohibited from owning land.
• Freedman’s Bureau

  Federal government agency established in 1865 to aid nearly 4 million emancipated slaves as they transitioned to freedom.
• Freedman’s Bureau

  It provided:

  • Schools for education

  • Medical care

  • Marriage Certificates
• Compromise of 1877


  Hayes promised to show concern for Southern interests and end Reconstruction in exchange for the Democrats accepting the fraudulent election results. He took Union troops out of the South.