Fighting, Freedom and Reconstruction: How the Union Won and What Came After
Practice Flashcards
Flip to reveal answersWhat was the Anaconda Plan?
Track your progress — Sign up free to save your progress and get smart review reminders based on spaced repetition.
All 12 Flashcards — Fighting, Freedom and Reconstruction: How the Union Won and What Came After
Sign up free to track progress and get spaced-repetition review schedules.
Question
What was the Anaconda Plan?
Answer
The Union's overall strategy: blockade Southern ports, seize the Mississippi River, and split the Confederacy — slow strangulation rather than one big battle.
Question
Name three Union advantages over the Confederacy in 1861.
Answer
Much larger population (22m vs 9m, of whom 3.5m enslaved); most of the industry and railways; the existing navy and merchant fleet for a blockade.
Question
Name two Confederate advantages in 1861.
Answer
Fighting a defensive war on home ground (easier to supply and just needed to survive), and generally stronger senior military leadership early on, especially Robert E. Lee.
Question
What did the Emancipation Proclamation (1 January 1863) actually do?
Answer
Declared enslaved people free only in Confederate states still in rebellion — not in border slave states loyal to the Union. It reframed the war as a fight against slavery and let African Americans enlist in the Union army.
Question
How many African Americans served in the Union army and navy?
Answer
About 180,000 in the army (roughly 10% of Union forces) plus thousands in the navy — for example the U.S. Colored Troops regiments.
Question
Why did the Confederacy fail to win foreign recognition from Britain?
Answer
Britain would not recognise a slaveholding power once the war became explicitly about ending slavery after 1863, and the Union blockade plus Northern wheat exports reduced Britain's reliance on Confederate cotton.
Question
What was the turning point of 1863 in the Eastern and Western theatres?
Answer
Gettysburg (July 1863) stopped Lee's invasion of the North; Vicksburg (July 1863) gave the Union control of the whole Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two.
Question
What was Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan?
Answer
His 1863 presidential Reconstruction plan: a Confederate state could rejoin the Union once 10% of its 1860 voters swore loyalty to the Union and accepted the end of slavery — a lenient, quick-reunion approach.
Question
What did the Radical Republicans' Congressional Reconstruction plan demand instead?
Answer
A tougher line: the Wade-Davis Bill (1864) required 50% loyalty oaths, and after 1867 Congress imposed military rule on the South plus the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteeing citizenship and Black male suffrage.
Question
Name two methods of Southern resistance to Reconstruction.
Answer
Violent intimidation by groups like the Ku Klux Klan (founded 1865-66), and legal methods such as Black Codes and later literacy tests/poll taxes to restrict African American rights and voting.
Question
What ended Reconstruction in 1877?
Answer
The Compromise of 1877: disputed presidential election resolved by making Rutherford B. Hayes president in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South, ending federal protection of Black civil rights there.
Question
Give one lasting success and one lasting failure of Reconstruction.
Answer
Success: slavery permanently abolished (13th Amendment) and Black citizenship/suffrage written into the Constitution. Failure: most Southern Black Americans remained poor sharecroppers and were soon disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws.
Read the notes
Full study notes for Fighting, Freedom and Reconstruction: How the Union Won and What Came After
Topic 19.8 hub
US Civil War: causes, course and effects (1840–1877)
More from Topic 19.8
All flashcards in this topic
History exam skills
Paper structures & tips
Track your progress with spaced repetition
Sign up free — Aimnova tells you exactly which cards to review and when, so you remember everything before your IB exam.
Start Free