Civil War
mia brady
Kansas-Nebraska Act
- The person behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act was senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
- 1854 bill that mandated "popular sovereignty" allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new states borders.
- To gain the southerners support Douglas proposed creating two territories in the area Kansas and Nebraska and repealing the Missouri Compromise line.
- The act passed Congress but it failed in its purposes, by the time Kansas was admitted to statehood in 1861 after an internal civil war, southern states had begun to secede from the Union.
Gettysburg
- The ten roads that led into the town of Gettysburg are what brought the armies there.
- The first days fighting involved 50,000 soldiers of which roughly 15,500 were killed, wounded or missing, the first day its self ranked as the 12th bloodiest battle of the Civil War.
- General George Gordon Meade was only in command for the three days before the battle ever happened.
- Eight soldiers were awarded with the medals of honor for there actions.
- There are more than 1,400 monuments, markers and tablets at Gettysburg.
Dred Scott Case
- The Dred Scott case was one of the most controversial events preceding the American Civil War
- Dred Scott and his wife had once belonged to army surgeon John Emerson, who had bought him from the Peter Blow family of St. Louis.
- Dred Scott, a slave who had lived with his owner in a free state before returning to the slave state of Missouri. Scott argued that his time spent in these locations entitled him to emancipation.
- Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts planned to dissent, arguing that Scott should be freed under the Missouri Compromise because he had traveled north of the 36°30′ line, whereas the Court’s southerners wanted to rule the compromise unconstitutional
Fredericksburg
- Union General Ambrose Burnside did not want command of the army of the Potomac he before than turned down two other offers of promotion from Lincoln
- Stonewall Jacksons 37,000 men occupied wooded high ground with open farmlands stretching below them for mile
- A 600 yard marshland that the Confederate commanders considered impassible divided Jacksons lines.
- Burnside planned to use the 60,000 men in his "Left Grand Division" to crush Lee's right flank.
- Burnside's "diversion" produced around 8,000 Union casualties compared to 1,000 fallen Confederates.