Key Idea: Why the United States split over slavery, how the Union won the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, and why Reconstruction failed to protect Black Americans by 1877.
Road to war, 1840 to 1860
- By 1860, cotton tied Southern wealth to enslaved labour.
- Resistance: Nat Turner's Rebellion and Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad.
- Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.
- Crises: the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, and Lincoln's election in 1860.
War and Reconstruction
- Strengths — The Union had more people, industry, railways and a navy; the South fought at home with generals like Lee.
- 1863 — Gettysburg stopped Lee; Vicksburg gave the Union the Mississippi; the Emancipation Proclamation.
- Abroad — Britain and France stayed neutral once the war was against slavery.
- Reconstruction — Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan against Congress's tougher plans; the 14th and 15th Amendments.
- 1877 — Black Codes and the Klan, then a compromise that withdrew federal troops.
States' rights was mainly a tool to defend slavery; the North's resources won, but the peace was lost by 1877.
How many African American soldiers joined after emancipation? Roughly 180,000.
Who made the Compromise of 1850? Henry Clay.
Why did Vicksburg matter? It split the Confederacy along the Mississippi.
What left Black civil rights unprotected? The Compromise of 1877, which took federal troops out of the South.