Civil War
Jenny Lor
Kansas Nebraska Act
In the early 1850s settlers would not move there because they could not legally hold a claim on the land. The leader behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act was Senator Stephan A. Douglas of Illinois. He wanted to see Nebraska made into a territory and, to win southern support, and to proposed a southern state inclined to support slavery. It was his desire to build a transcontinental railroad to go through Chicago.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed:
- Each territory to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty.
- The bill was passed in May of 1854.
- Passage of the bill split the Whig Party.
Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war.
- The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."
- It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states.
- It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. The freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.
Dred Scott Case
March 1857, the case had been brought before the court by Dred Scott, a slave who had lived with his owner in a free state before returning to the slave state of Missouri. He argued that his time spent in these locations entitled him to emancipation.
- Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, supporter of slavery, disagreed: the court found that no black, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship, and therefore blacks were unable to petition the court for freedom.
- This case incensed abolitionists and heightened North-South tensions, which would erupt in war three years later.
- Dred Scott, along with several members of his family, was formally emancipated by his owner just three months after the Supreme Court denied them their freedom in the Dred Scott decision.
Vicksburg
In May and June of 1863, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's armies converged on Vicksburg, investing the city and entrapping a Confederate army under Lt. Gen. John Pemberton. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee had been trying to wrest away the strategic Confederate river fortress of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
- Grant undertook a new bold campaign against Vicksburg and the Confederate defender Pemberton. After conducting a surprise landing below Vicksburg at Bruinsburg, Mississippi, Grant's forces moved rapidly inland, pushing back the threat posed by Joseph E. Johnston's forces near Jackson.
- Union victories at Champion Hill and Big Black Bridge weakened Pemberton's forces, leaving the Confederate chief with no alternative but to retreat to Vicksburg's defenses.
- Soldiers and civilians alike endured the privations of siege warfare for 47 days before the surrender of Pemberton's forces on July 4,1863. With the Mississippi River now firmly in Union hands, the Confederacy's fate was all but sealed.