U.S. HISTORY STUDY SHEET FOR THE EOC EXAM

Content Focus Terms, People, Organizations, Events, Documents, and Laws

The Civil War, Reconstruction, and Westward Expansion

(Benchmarks SS.912.A.2.1 - SS.912.A.2.7)

1. Kansas-Nebraska Act: This law created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through popular sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. The act was designed by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. The initial purpose of the Kansas–Nebraska Act was to open up many thousands of new farms and make feasible a Midwestern Transcontinental Railroad. It became a problem when popular sovereignty was written into the proposal so that the voters of the moment would decide whether slavery would be allowed or not. The result was that pro- and anti-slavery elements flooded into Kansas with the goal of voting slavery up or down, leading to a bloody civil war. The term "Bleeding Kansas" was coined by Republican Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, to describe this civil war; its violence indicated that compromise was unlikely. Many people believe the Civil War actually began in 1854 with the passage of this law.

2. Black Codes: In the United States, the most notorious Black Codes were laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War. These laws had the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans' freedom and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt.

3. Compromise: an agreement or a settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions.

4. Debt peonage: Debt bondage (also known as debt slavery or bonded labor) is a person's pledge of their labor or services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.

5. Nadir: The word is used figuratively to mean the lowest point of a person's spirits or the lowest point in terms of quality in an activity or profession.

6. Popular sovereignty: the power of the people of a nation to directly or indirectly control the policies and directives of the government.

7. Indian reservation system: In 1851, the United States Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act which authorized the creation of Indian reservations in modern day Oklahoma. Relations between settlers and natives had grown increasingly worse as the settlers encroached on territory and natural resources in the West. By the late 1860s, President Ulysses S. Grant pursued a stated "Peace Policy" as a possible solution to the conflict between white settlers and American Indian tribes whose lands were being taken. The policy included a reorganization of the Indian Service, with the goal of relocating various tribes from their ancestral homes to parcels of lands established specifically for their inhabitation.

8. Sharecropping: Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land. Sharecropping was a way for very poor farmers (both black and white) to earn a living from land owned by someone else. The landowner provided land, housing, tools and seed, and perhaps a mule, and a local merchant loaned money for food and supplies. At harvest time the sharecropper received a share of the crop (from one-third to one-half), which paid off his debt to the merchant. By the late 1860s white farmers also became sharecroppers.

9. State’s rights: The balance of national government powers and those powers held by the states as defined in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution was first addressed in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). The Court's decision by Chief Justice John Marshall asserted that the laws adopted by the federal government, when exercising its constitutional powers, are generally superior to any conflicting laws adopted by state governments. A major dispute over states' rights was over the issue of slavery. Supporters of slavery often argued that slavery was a right reserved to the states by the 10th amendment.

10. Suffrage: Suffrage is the right to vote gained through the democratic process. Throughout the course of American history, suffrage has been extended to more and more groups of people who had previously been denied the right. The major extensions of suffrage occurred with the 15TH amendment (black males), the 19th amendment (women), 24th amendment (eliminated pol taxes and literacy tests as requirements to vote), and the 26th amendment (lowered the age of voting from 21 to 18).

11. Abraham Lincoln: 16th President of the USA, and the leader of America through the American Civil War. A practical and effective war president, Lincoln made many moves that were questioned, such as his promotion of Ulysses S. Grant to the position of leader of the Union’s armed forces when Grant began the war as a captain, or his move to suspend habeas corpus and position martial law in the border states to prevent a possible change of heart (border states were states that were slave states that didn’t secede and states that were on the border of the 36-30 line). To Lincoln, the preservation of the United States was more important than anything else; for Lincoln, the end justified the means.

12. Stephen Douglas: Douglas was an American politician from Illinois and the designer of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. He was a U.S. Representative, a U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party nominee for President in the 1860 election, which he lost to Republican Abraham Lincoln. Douglas had previously defeated Lincoln in the 1856 Illinois Senate race, which was noted for the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 over westward expansion of slavery into the western territories. Ironically, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the cause of bloody fighting in those two territories, and many historians believe that the Civil War really began with the passage of that law in 1854. The disaster of the act was the catalyst that allowed Lincoln to win the 1860 Presidential election.

13. Jefferson Davis: The only President of the Confederate States of America. Under Davis’ leadership, the confederacy faced insurmountable odds and was finally vanquished in April of 1865. After Davis was captured in 1865, he was accused of treason but was not tried and was released after two years. While not disgraced, Davis had been displaced in white Southern affection after the war by his leading general, Robert E. Lee. Nevertheless, many Southerners empathized with his defiance, refusal to accept defeat, and resistance to Reconstruction.

14. Ulysses S. Grant: He was the 18th president of the United States (1869–1877) following his success as military commander in the American Civil War. Under Grant, the Union Army defeated the Confederate military; the war ended with the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. As president, Grant led the Radical Republicans in their effort to eliminate vestiges of Confederate nationalism and slavery, protect African American citizenship, and defeat the Ku Klux Klan. During his second term the country's economy was devastated by the Panic of 1873, while investigations exposed corruption scandals in the administration. The conservative white Southerners regained control of Southern state governments and Democrats took control of the federal House of Representatives. By the time Grant left the White House in 1877, his Reconstruction policies were being undone.

15. Andrew Johnson: He was the 17th President of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. Johnson became president as Abraham Lincoln's vice president at the time of Lincoln's assassination. The new president favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union and full implementation of Lincoln’s plan to reunite the nation without overly punishing the south. His plans, however, did not give protection to the former slaves, and he came into conflict with the Radical Republican dominated Congress, culminating in his impeachment by the House of Representatives. The first American president to be impeached, he was acquitted in the Senate by one vote. His political career was finished, however.

16. Robert E. Lee: He was an American career military officer who is best known for having commanded the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War. He emerged as a shrewd tactician and battlefield commander, winning numerous battles against far superior Union armies. His abilities as a tactician have been praised by many military historians, and he is even today revered in the Deep South.

17. Ku Klux Klan: The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations (1. Post-Civil War, 2. Xenophobic anti-immigration throughout the first 1/3 of the 20th century, and 3. The anti-black civil rights movement that began sometime in the 1950’s and continues to this day, albeit with less fanfare and power) which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically expressed through real and symbolic terrorism. Since the mid-20th century, the KKK has also been anti-communist. The current manifestation is splintered into several chapters with no connection to each other; it is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is estimated to have between 5,000 and 8,000 members as of 2012.

18. Carpetbaggers: In United States history, a carpetbagger was a Northerner (Yankee) who moved to the South after the U.S. Civil War, especially during the Reconstruction era (1865-1877), in order to profit from the instability and power vacuum that existed at this time.

19. Scalawags: In United States history, scalawags were southern whites who supported Reconstruction, carpetbaggers, and the Republican Party after the American Civil War.

20. Freedman’s Bureau: was a U.S. federal government agency (1866-1870) that aided distressed freedmen (freed slaves) during the Reconstruction era of the United States, though by 1870 it had been considerably weakened and was completely gone by the end of Reconstruction in 1876-1877.

21. Radical Republicans: The Radical Republicans were a faction within the Republican Party from about 1854 (before the American Civil War) until the end of Reconstruction in 1877. They called themselves "radicals" because they opposed the lenient policies of more moderate factions of the Republican party factions led by Abraham Lincoln and after the war by "conservatives" (in the South) and "liberals" (in the North). Radical republicans strongly opposed slavery during the war and after the war distrusted ex-Confederates, demanding harsh policies for the former rebels, and emphasizing civil rights and voting rights for freedmen (recently freed slaves).

22. Rutherford B. Hayes: was the 19th President of the United States (1877–1881). As president, he oversaw the end of Reconstruction, and was actually elected in the closest election in American Presidential election history. The vote was so close that Northern Republicans felt obligated to end reconstruction in a compromise with the Southern state leadership who were ready to demand a recount and/or decry the election as being “fixed”. Hayes began the efforts that eventually led to civil service reform (Pendleton Act of 1883), and attempted to reconcile the divisions left over from the Civil War and Reconstruction.

23. William Tecumseh Sherman: Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator and author. He served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–65), for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the "scorched earth" policies that he implemented in conducting total war against the Confederate States. Sherman served under General Ulysses S. Grant in 1862 and 1863 during the campaigns that led to the fall of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River and ended with the routing of the Confederate armies in the state of Tennessee. In 1864, Sherman succeeded Grant as the Union commander in the western theater of the war after Grant took command of the entire Union army. He proceeded to lead his troops east during the scorched earth campaign of 1864 and 1865 to capture of the city of Atlanta, a military success that contributed to the re-election of President Abraham Lincoln. Sherman's subsequent march through Georgia and the Carolinas further undermined the Confederacy's ability to continue fighting.

24. The Anaconda Plan: This is the name widely applied to an outline strategy for subduing the Southern states in the American Civil War. Proposed by General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, the plan emphasized the naval blockade of the Southern ports, and called for an advance up the Mississippi River to cut the South in two, which would effectively end the western war.

25. Civil Rights Act of 1866: This Act declared that people born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power are entitled to be citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude. It also said that any non-white citizen has the same rights as a white citizen to make and enforce contracts, sue and be sued, give evidence in court, and inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property. Additionally, the Act guaranteed to all citizens the "full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and ... like punishment, pains, and penalties..."

26. Compromise of 1850: The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five laws passed in September 1850, which defused a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North regarding the status of western territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). The compromise delayed secession and civil war for 10 years but ultimately failed to prevent that disaster from occurring. The following are the provisions of this compromise:

  1. Texas’ application to become a state was approved after it surrendered its claim to New Mexico (over which it had threatened war) as well as its claims north of the Missouri Compromise Line, transferred its large public debt to the federal government, and retained control over El Paso that it had established earlier in 1850, with the Texas Panhandle thrown in at the last moment.
  2. California's application for admission as a free state with its current boundaries was approved and a Southern proposal to split California at parallel 35° north to provide a Southern territory was not approved (this made the Missouri compromise 36-30 line obsolete).
  3. The South avoided adoption of the symbolically significant Wilmot Proviso (the Wilmot Proviso, one of the major events leading to the American Civil War, would have banned slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico following the Mexican War).
  4. The new New Mexico Territory and Utah Territory could in principle decide in the future to become slave states (popular sovereignty), even though Utah and a northern fringe of New Mexico were north of the Missouri Compromise Line where slavery had previously been banned in territories.
  5. The most concrete Southern gain was the Fugitive Slave Act, the enforcement of which outraged Northern public opinion. It required that all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that all officials and citizens of Free states had to cooperate in this law.

27. Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857): In this decision, the Court held that African Americans whether slave or free, could not be American citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court (in other words, if a free black person in a free state was forced into slavery in that state, the black person could legally do nothing about it, even though slavery was illegal in that state!). It went further to say that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States.

28. Battle of Gettysburg: Considered by many (along with the rebel surrender at Vicksburg the next day) to be the turning point of the Civil War, this three day battle in the summer of 1863 involved the largest number of casualties of any battle in this horrible war. General Lee believed that the North would be open to surrendering the war if he could penetrate into union territory in Pennsylvania as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or even Philadelphia possibly. General Grant and President Lincoln sent troops to try and stop them and Gettysburg, PA was where they ended up meeting. The Union dug in and after suffering some early losses on day one, had begun to wear down Lee’s troops by the end of the second day. On the third day, a desperate plan was put together by Lee to try and use a massive assault on the center of the Union lines to try and break through. The Union leader at Gettysburg, General George Meade, predicted the night before that Lee would attempt this, and the Union forces were ready for it and decimated the rebel charge. This suicide run is known as “Pickett’s charge”, named after Maj. Gen. George Pickett, one of three Confederate generals who led the assault. Defeated, Lee soon ordered a retreat from battle, and while what was left of his army did escape, they were never able to fight offensively again and never really threatened the union militarily after this.