American Civil War and Reconstruction Vocabulary

A comprehensive vocabulary review set covering key individuals, battles, laws, elections, and constitutional amendments of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era.

Fugitive Slave Law

Part of the Compromise of 1850, Northerners were required to send escaped slaves back to their owners in the South.

John Brown

A prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement in the decades preceding the Civil War. He would lead a raid at Harper's Ferry to try and start a slave revolt, would be arrested for the action, and eventually executed for trying to incite an insurrection against the United States.

Bleeding Kansas

This Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations between 1854 and 1859 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in this proposed state.

Abraham Lincoln

The 16th President of the United States, he would serve during the Civil War and was the 1st President in U.S. history to be assassinated.

Border States

In the context of the American Civil War (1861-65), these were slave states that did not secede from the Union. They were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and after 1863, the new state of West Virginia.

Fort Sumter

The bombardment of this location near Charleston, South Carolina by the South Carolina militia. It ended with the surrender by the United States Army, beginning the American Civil War.

Election of 1860

Election between Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, and two Democratic candidates (Stephen Douglas and John C Breckenridge). After Lincoln wins, many Southern states seceded because they felt that their vote did not matter and that federal government would try to limit/end slavery.

Election of 1864

In the midst of the American Civil War, incumbent President Abraham Lincoln easily defeated the Democratic nominee, former General George B. McClellan, by a wide margin of 212-21 in the electoral college, with 55% of the popular vote.

Freedmen's Bureau

Group designed to assist both freed slaves and poor whites in the South; this group set up schools, helped with unemployment etc.

Battle of Antietam

This battle ended the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's first invasion into the North and led Abraham Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

Battle of Gettysburg

Battle that was the turning point in the Civil War, the Union victory that ended General Robert E. Lee's second and most ambitious invasion of the North.

Battle of Vicksburg

Battle for the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River; capturing it completed the second part of the Northern strategy. The successful ending of this campaign significantly degraded the ability of the Confederacy to maintain its war effort.

Sherman's March to the Sea

An American Civil War campaign lasting from November 15 to December 21, 1864, in which Union-led troops went through the Confederate state of Georgia, pillaging the countryside and destroying both military outposts and civilian properties.

Ulysses S. Grant

An American military officer and politician who served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. As commanding general, he led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War in 1865.

Robert E. Lee

A Confederate general during the American Civil War, toward the end of which he was appointed the overall commander of the Confederate States Army.

13th Amendment

Amendment that officially abolishes slavery.

14th Amendment

The 1868 amendment to the Constitution of the United States that granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the American Civil War.

15th Amendment

Amendment that prohibits the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude".

Radical Republicans

Group during Reconstruction that wanted the military rule over the South. They also fought for black suffrage, black citizenship, and for the redistribution of land.

Ku Klux Klan

Group in the South that was started in order to intimidate free blacks in the South and stop them from voting.

Sharecropping

A type of farming in which families rent small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year.

Reconstruction

The period in American history that lasted from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War and is a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights.

Election of 1876

Republican Rutherford Hayes lost the popular vote to Democratic Samuel Tilden, but would win the Electoral College by 1 vote after disputed electoral votes went in his favor. As a compromise, the federal government agreed to end Reconstruction so that Democratic leaders would agree to the vote total.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Jim Crow Laws

State and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. All were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures after the Reconstruction period.