Curated category
Politics of the American Civil War
- Assassination of Abraham LincolnThe assassination of Abraham Lincoln began not with a gunshot but with a letter. On the morning of the 14th of April 1865, John Wilkes Booth visited Ford's…
- Reconstruction AmendmentsThe Reconstruction Amendments are three additions to the United States Constitution adopted in a span of just five years, between 1865 and 1870.
- Missouri secessionMissouri secession sits at one of the strangest intersections in American history: a state that voted 98-1 against leaving the Union, yet ended up with two…
- Slavery in the United StatesSlavery in the United States lasted from the country's founding in 1776 until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on the 6th of December, 1865.
- Confederate States of AmericaOn the 12th of April 1861, artillery shells arced over Charleston Harbor and slammed into the walls of Fort Sumter. The Confederate States of America had…
- Border states (American Civil War)Border states of the American Civil War occupied a peculiar and fateful position: slave states that chose the Union over the Confederacy, at least officially.
- Ordinance of SecessionOn the 20th of December 1860, delegates in South Carolina signed a document that set the United States on a collision course with itself.
- Proclamation 80Proclamation 80 is a document that launched the American Civil War in the most direct sense a government can act: it called men to arms.
- Origins of the American Civil WarOrigins of the American Civil War begins with a single sentence in a legal document. After Mississippi left the Union, its leaders published a declaration…
- Union (American Civil War)The Union, the name given to the federal government and loyal states of the United States during the American Civil War, was fighting not just for territory…
- Peace Conference of 1861The Peace Conference of 1861 opened its doors on the 4th of February 1861 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., and at the very moment John Tyler was…
- Republican Party (United States)The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by a coalition of people with one shared demand: stop the spread of slavery. Within six years, a Republican sat in…
- War Governors' ConferenceThe Loyal War Governors' Conference gathered thirteen Union governors at a hotel in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on the 24th and the 25th of September, 1862.