The Civil War and after

Between 1861 and 1865 the United States fought a war against itself. The states of the North stayed with the federal government and were called the Union. Eleven Southern states declared that they were leaving and formed their own government, the Confederacy. The name of this war between the North and the South is the Civil War. On the older test the answer the War between the States is also accepted.

The older test asks you to name a problem that led to the Civil War. Three answers are accepted: slavery, economic reasons and states' rights. Slavery is part of all three.

By 1860 nearly four million people were held as slaves in the United States, almost all of them in the South. Southern wealth came from cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar grown by enslaved workers. The North depended more on paid labor, small farms and factories. For forty years the two sides argued over whether slavery could spread into the new western territories. Each agreement they made lasted only a short time.

States' rights was the other argument. Southern leaders said that each state had joined the Union of its own free will and could therefore leave it. They also said that a state could settle a question such as slavery for itself. The federal government answered that the Union was permanent and that no state could break it apart.

The fighting began in April 1861, when Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. It ended almost exactly four years later, in April 1865, when the main Confederate army surrendered at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

The newer test asks you to name one important event of the Civil War. Eight answers are accepted. The attack on Fort Sumter started the war. Antietam in Maryland was a battle in 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in the Confederacy. Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and Vicksburg in Mississippi were battles in 1863. Sherman's March crossed Georgia in 1864. The surrender at Appomattox ended the main fighting. President Lincoln was killed, or assassinated, a few days after that surrender.

The war settled two things. The country stayed one country, and slavery came to an end. The newer test asks which United States war ended slavery. The answer is the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States. He was elected in 1860 and took office in March 1861, a few weeks before the Civil War began. He led the country through the whole war.

Both tests ask about Abraham Lincoln. The older test asks for one important thing he did, and the newer test asks what he is famous for. Three answers are accepted on the older test. He freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. He saved, or preserved, the Union. He led the United States during the Civil War. The newer test accepts those three and two more. He was the sixteenth president. He delivered the Gettysburg Address.

The Emancipation Proclamation was an order Lincoln signed on January 1, 1863. It declared that the enslaved people in the states then in rebellion against the United States were free. Both tests ask what it did. Four answers are accepted: it freed the slaves; it freed the slaves in the Confederacy; it freed the slaves in the Confederate states; it freed the slaves in most Southern states. It did not cover the four slave states that had stayed loyal to the Union. It also did not cover Tennessee, or the parts of Virginia and Louisiana that Union armies already held. That is why one accepted answer is that it freed the slaves in most Southern states. In practice freedom arrived as Union armies moved south. The order also opened the Union Army and Navy to Black men, and about 200,000 of them served.

The Gettysburg Address was a short speech Lincoln gave in November 1863. He spoke at the dedication of a cemetery for the soldiers killed at the battle of Gettysburg. The speech lasted about two minutes. He said that the nation had been founded on the idea that all men are created equal. He also said that a government of the people, by the people, for the people must not disappear from the earth.

Lincoln was re-elected in 1864 and lived to see the Confederate surrender. Five days later, on April 14, 1865, he was shot in a theater in Washington, D.C. He died the next morning. He was the first American president to be murdered.

An order signed by one president can be undone by the next. So slavery was ended for good by changing the Constitution itself. The 13th Amendment, added in December 1865, banned slavery everywhere in the United States.

In the 1800s women in the United States could not vote in most elections. In many states a married woman could not own property in her own name, keep the wages she earned, or sign a contract. A movement started to change this, and the vote became its central demand.

Susan B. Anthony, who lived from 1820 to 1906, is the best-known leader of that movement. The older test asks what she did. Two answers are accepted: she fought for women's rights, and she fought for civil rights. She grew up in a Quaker family, worked as a teacher, and campaigned against slavery. Then she spent the rest of her life working for the vote for women. For decades she traveled the country making speeches, collecting signatures on petitions, and asking Congress for an amendment.

In November 1872 she voted in an election in Rochester, New York. She was arrested, put on trial and fined 100 dollars. She refused to pay the fine and never did, and the trial put her argument in newspapers across the country.

The newer test asks you to name one leader of the women's rights movement in the 1800s. Six answers are accepted: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Lucy Stone. In 1848 Stanton and Mott organized a meeting at Seneca Falls, New York. It was the first women's rights convention in the country, and it called for women to be allowed to vote. Anthony met Stanton in 1851, and the two worked together for the next fifty years.

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York, gained her freedom, and became a well-known speaker against slavery and for the rights of women. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland and went back many times to lead other people out. During the Civil War she worked for the Union Army, and afterwards she supported votes for women. Lucy Stone was another leading speaker who helped build a national organization for women's suffrage. Suffrage is an older word for the right to vote.

First the change came state by state. Wyoming Territory let women vote from 1869, and other western states followed. Then it came for the whole country at once. The nationwide change was the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, added in 1920, which says the right to vote cannot be denied because of sex. The newer test asks when all women got the right to vote. Three answers are accepted: 1920, after World War I, or with the 19th Amendment.

Anthony died in 1906 and did not live to see it, although the amendment is often called by her name. The vote also did not reach everyone in 1920. Many American Indian women and men were not citizens until a law passed in 1924. In parts of the South, Black women and men were kept from voting until the civil rights laws of the 1960s. States there used a tax people had to pay before they could vote (a poll tax) and a reading test.