APUSH: Civil War & Reconstruction

Admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30′.

California admitted as a free state A stronger Fugitive Slave Act Popular sovereignty in the Utah and New Mexico territories Slave trade (not slavery) banned in Washington, D.C.

Popular sovereignty

Stephen Douglas's law applied popular sovereignty to Kansas and Nebraska, repealing the Missouri Compromise line. It led to violence in “Bleeding Kansas” and the founding of the Republican Party.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Black Americans were not citizens and could not sue, and Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, which made the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.

Stephen Douglas's argument in the Lincoln-Douglas debates that territories could keep slavery out by refusing to pass laws protecting it, despite Dred Scott.

An attempt to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and start a slave uprising. Brown was hanged and became a martyr to many Northerners.

Ten more states followed by mid-1861.

Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina (April 1861)

A strategy to blockade Southern ports and take control of the Mississippi River to squeeze the Confederacy economically.

It was the bloodiest single day of the war, and the Union's narrow win gave Lincoln the moment to announce the Emancipation Proclamation.

Declared enslaved people free in areas still in rebellion. It did not apply to the loyal border states, but it made ending slavery a Union war aim and allowed Black men to enlist.

Together these are seen as the turning point of the war.

General William T. Sherman's march from Atlanta to Savannah, destroying railroads, crops and property: an example of total war.

Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in April 1865

John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865; Lincoln died the next morning.

The Ten Percent Plan

A federal agency that gave formerly enslaved people food, schools, legal help and help negotiating labor contracts.

Laws passed by Southern states after the war to restrict the rights and movement of freed Black people and force them into low-wage labor.

Except as punishment for a crime.

It overturned the citizenship part of Dred Scott.

Southern states later got around it with poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses.

Divided the former Confederacy into five military districts and required states to ratify the 14th Amendment and allow Black men to vote before rejoining the Union.

For violating the Tenure of Office Act by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. The Senate acquitted him by one vote.

Hiram Revels

A system where landless farmers, many of them freedpeople, farmed a landowner's land for a share of the crop, often trapping them in debt.

Settled the disputed 1876 election: Rutherford B. Hayes became president and federal troops were withdrawn from the South, ending Reconstruction.