Week 5: The civil war

Question 1

Industry before the US Civil War

Answer 1

• textile and steel industries
• largely confined to the North
• wheat was grown on increasingly large and mechanized farms

Question 2

Agriculture before the US Civil War

Answer 2

• Southern States
• mostly traditional and pre-industrial
• slave labour
• culture of cotton on big plantations
• plus rice, tobacco and sugar

Question 3

Slavery in the Antebellum South

Answer 3

• defence of slavery in the name of slave welfare
• John C. Calhoun (prominent advocate for slavery during the first half of the 19th century)
• contrasted slavery to:
  
  • the harsh working conditions
  • lack of social protection of industrial workers in Europe and the North of the US
    –> “white slavery”

Question 4

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

Answer 4

• 1831
• Massacre in Virginia
• slave rebellion
• death of around 50 white men and women
• hanging of Nat Turner and over a hundred slaves
  –> put to death in retaliation

Question 5

Frederick Douglass

Answer 5

• 1818-1895
• Runaway slave from Maryland
• prominent spokesman for the abolition of slavery
• recounted his experiences in Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)

Question 6

1850 Compromise

Answer 6

• Several acts passed by US Congress to calm tensions between North and South
• California admitted as a free state
• slavery abolished in Washington DC
• Fugitive Slave Act
  –> both sides unhappy

Question 7

Fugitive Slave Act

Answer 7

• allowed slaves owners to retrieve their runaway slaves (even North of the Missouri Compromise line)
• forced the North to indirectly participate in the institution of slavery

Question 8

Why were both North and South unhappy of the 1850 Compromise?

Answer 8

• the South because there was no slavery in California
• the North because of the Fugitive law

Question 9

1854 Kansas and Nebraska Act

Answer 9

• repealed the Missouri compromise
• states could now decide whether to become free or slave states based on popular vote
• people flooded into Kansas to tip the votee in either direction
  –> resulted in number of armed conflicts: “Bleeding Kansas”

Question 10

What did the Kansas and Nebraska Act lead to?

Answer 10

• the creation of the Republican Party
• 1854

Question 11

Republican Party

Answer 11

• 1854
• fundamentally opposed to the expansion of slavery
• Abraham Lincoln first Republican President (elected in 1860)
• “A House Divided” Speech

Question 12

“A House Divided” Speech

Answer 12

• Abraham Lincoln
• 1858
• argued that the current status quo was unacceptable
• either the US would abolish slavery everywhere (+)
• either it would legalise slavery everywhere

Question 13

Abraham Lincoln

Answer 13

• first Republican President
• 16th President of the USA
• In office: March 4, 1861 - April 15 1865

Question 14

What are the dates of the Civil War?

Answer 14

1861-1865

Question 15

What happened in December 1860?

Answer 15

• South Carolina formally seceded from the United States
• followed at once by:
  - Mississippi
  - Florida
  - Alabama
  - Georgia
  - Louisiana
  - Texas

Question 16

What is the real name of the Confederacy? When was it announced?

Answer 16

• The Confederate States of America
• February 4th, 1861

Question 17

How did the war begin?

Answer 17

• Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter (South Carolina) in 1861
• Lincoln and the North regarded this as an act of rebellion

Question 18

As what the Northern States became known?

Answer 18

The Union

Question 19

Who had the best military potential between the North and the South?

Answer 19

• North
• twice as populous as the South
• had naval command and solid financial base

Question 20

40 Acres and a Mule

Answer 20

• Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863
• set free the slaves of ‘rebel’ states and encouraged them to join the Union army: were organized into segregated all-black regiments
• some of the land confiscated from defeated Southern planters were set aside by Special Field Order No. 15
  –> distributed to freed slaves at the end of the Civil War along with a mule

Question 21

What happened to the Special Field Order No. 15?

Answer 21

• reversed when Andrew Johnson became president
• after the assassination of Lincoln
• ordered confiscated lands to be given back to their former owners

Question 22

End of the Civil War

Answer 22

• ended in July 1865
• roughly 359,000 Union soldiers and 258,000 Confederates had died
• bloodiest war in American History

Question 23

Why was the South defeated?

Answer 23

• Emancipation Proclamation
• Decline of cotton production:
  - embargoes
  - blockades
  - war: food crops had to be grown instead of cotton
• Under-industrialization
  - first industrialized conflict
  - technically feasible to arm, supply and reinforce enormous armies continously and move them rapidly to any battlefield

Question 24

Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Answer 24

• 1865
• John Wilkes Booth
  –> wanted to revive the Confederate cause
• replaced by his Vice-President: Andrew Johnson
  –> Democrat from Tennessee
  –> eager to readmit former Confederate states into the Union
  –> much more reluctant than Lincoln to see equal civil rights and the right to vote granted to freedmen