A Nation Divides

From the start, the country was split over slavery. The Southern economy ran on enslaved labor on cotton plantations; the North was moving toward factories and free labor. Every time the nation added new territory, the fight flared up over whether it would allow slavery.

The road to war

• ●Compromises (like the Missouri Compromise of 1820) tried to keep slave and free states balanced
• ●The Dred Scott decision (1857) denied citizenship to Black Americans and inflamed the North
• ●Abraham Lincoln, against the spread of slavery, was elected President in 1860
• ●Southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy

The Civil War (1861 to 1865)

The Union (North) fought the Confederacy (South). It became the deadliest war in American history. In 1863, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people in the rebelling states free and made ending slavery a goal of the war.

• ●Gettysburg (1863): the turning point; the Confederacy never fully recovered
• ●1865: General Lee surrenders; the Union wins
• ●Lincoln is assassinated days after the war ends

Reconstruction (1865 to 1877)

The period of rebuilding the South and trying to bring formerly enslaved people into full citizenship. Three amendments came out of it, but progress was rolled back when federal troops left and unfair laws returned.

• ●13th Amendment: ended slavery
• ●14th Amendment: granted citizenship and equal protection
• ●15th Amendment: gave Black men the right to vote