Civil War
By: Jennifer Doggett
Kansas Nebraska Act
- The Kansas-Nebraska Act was an 1854 bill that mandated “popular sovereignty”–allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders.
- Kansas was admitted as a free state in January 1861 only weeks after eight Southern states seceded from the union.
- The conflicts that arose between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the aftermath of the act’s passage led to the period of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and helped paved the way for the American Civil War.
Key Leaders Stephen A. Douglas who was 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.
Emancipation Proclamation
- The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."
- President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of the civil war.
- The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the states in rebellion.
The key leader of the Emancipation Proclamation was Abraham Lincoln and he actually issued the Emancipation Proclamation twice.
Dred- Scott Case
- 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.
- Scott argued that his time spent in these locations entitled him to emancipation.
- 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.
Scott was a key leader in the Dred-Scott case and was arguing that he should be freed under the Missouri Compromise because he had traveled north of the 36°30′ line, where the Court’s southerners wanted to rule the compromise unconstitutional.
Appomattox Courthouse
- In just over one week before the battle at Appomattox Court House, Lee had lost more than half of his army.
On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his 28,000 troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in the front parlor of Wilmer McLean’s home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War
was one of the last battles of the American Civil War.
Key Leaders of this battle where General Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S Grant