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Primary sources such as historical documents, eyewitness accounts, and artifacts provide direct evidence of past events and perspectives. Secondary sources, including textbooks, biographies, and scholarly articles, analyze and interpret these primary sources, offering context and broader understanding of historical and social phenomena.

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Primary and Secondary Sources in History Explained

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Ancient Egypt was a very influential civilization due to the contributions in arts and architecture. It was the most powerful place in the region for over 3,000 years, from around 3100 B.C to 30 B.C. From this culture numerous monuments, documents and works of art that continue to be studied by scholars today were left behind. The equations discovered in this time period are things that people now are still currently going back to and learning from.

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The science of the arrangement of events based on the order of occurrence.

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Roman civilization is pivotal for its influence on law, governance, and architecture, which continue to shape modern society. Its innovations, such as the Roman legal system and monumental engineering feats like aqueducts and roads, laid the groundwork for many aspects of society today.

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The Roman Empire. Or Republic. Or...Which Was It?: Crash Course World History #10

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The Thirteen Colonies were foundational in the establishment of the United States, as their collective struggle for independence led to the American Revolutionary War and the eventual creation of a new nation. Their formation and subsequent rebellion against British rule highlighted early American values and contributed to shaping the future country's identity and political system.

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The American Revolution was sparked by growing resentment over British taxation and governance without representation, as colonists opposed measures like the Stamp Act and the Tea Act which they saw as unjust impositions. These grievances spurred the colonies to seek independence and assert their right to self-governance, ultimately leading to the conflict.

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Tea, Taxes, and The American Revolution: Crash Course World History #28

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George Washington is crucial as the first President of the United States, setting many precedents for the executive role and leading the country through its formative years. His leadership during the American Revolutionary War and his voluntary relinquishment of power after two terms established principles of how the United States is ran today.

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China has five main key aspects of its classical era that shape its history. Dynasties, how china marks their history. Social structure, division between population. Confucianism believed that people should be acting in virtue in all ways of life, from family to the state. Inventions, included papermaking, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. The Great Wall of China was built by emperors to protect the northern border of China.

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2,000 Years of Chinese History! The Mandate of Heaven and Confucius: World History #7

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The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy. During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly moved west by the United States government. Approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on this forced march, which became known as the "Trail of Tears." The Indian Removal Act marked the completion of ethically cleansing indigenous peoples from east of the Mississippi River. In the years that followed, subsequent federal policies would continue to uproot Indigenous peoples, clear the way for additional U.S. expansion, and remove Native peoples from their communities.

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The Indian Removal Act Explained in 5 Minutes: US History Review

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This was the process by which European settlers populated the regions of North, Central, and South America, and the islands of the Caribbean. As more Europeans arrived, more land was required by them, steadily forcing Native Americans onto reservations. We typically associate this with the name Christopher Columbus. Perhaps European colonization's single greatest impact on the North American environment was the introduction of new diseases which led to many deaths. Another thing that changed from this exchange was how money was made/ distributed. The concept of religion regarding others and what the entailed also started to take place at this time.

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Your Teacher LIED to You About Christopher Columbus

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Second President of the United States, writer, and founding father. Before he became president in 1797, he was a leader in the American Revolution and got independence from Great Britain.

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From the late 15th century to the early 19th century, a number of European powers were in search of religious, economic, and military advantages. This included: Spain, England, France, and Portugal.

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The Vikings Discover the New World

The first attempt by Europeans to colonize the New World occurred around1000 A.D. when the Vikings sailed from the British Isles to Greenland, established a colony and then moved on to Labrador, the Baffin Islands and finally Newfoundland. There they established a colony named Vineland (meaning fertile region) and from that base sailed along the coast of North America, observing the flora, fauna and native peoples. Inexplicably, Vineland was abandoned after only a few years.

Did you know? Explorer Henry Hudson died when his crew mutinied and left Hudson, his son and seven crewmembers adrift in a small open boat in the Hudson Bay.

Although the Vikings never returned to America, other Europeans came to know of their accomplishments. Europe, however, was made up of many small principalities whose concerns were mainly local. Europeans may have been intrigued by the stories of the feared Vikings' discovery of a "new world," but they lacked the resources or the will to follow their path of exploration. Trade continued to revolve around the Mediterranean Sea, as it had for hundreds of years.

The Reformation, the Renaissance and New Trade Routes

Between 1000 and 1650, a series of interconnected developments occurred in Europe that provided the impetus for the exploration and subsequent colonization of America. These developments included the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Renaissance, the unification of small states into larger ones with centralized political power, the emergence of new technology in navigation and shipbuilding and the establishment of overland trade with the East and the accompanying transformation of the medieval economy.

The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church's response in the Counter-Reformation marked the end of several centuries of gradual erosion of the power of the Catholic Church as well as the climax of internal attempts to reform the Church. Protestantism emphasized a personal relationship between each individual and God without the need for intercession by the institutional church.

In the Renaissance, artists and writers such as Galileo, Machiavelli and Michelangelo adopted a view of life that stressed humans' ability to change and control the world. Thus, the rise of Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation, along with the Renaissance, helped foster individualism and create a climate favorable to exploration.

At the same time, political centralization ended much of the squabbling and fighting among rival noble families and regions that had characterized the Middle Ages. With the decline of the political power and wealth of the Catholic Church, a few rulers gradually solidified their power. Portugal, Spain, France and England were transformed from small territories into nation-states with centralized authority in the hands of monarchs who were able to direct and finance overseas exploration.

As these religious and political changes were occurring, technological innovations in navigation set the stage for exploration. Bigger, faster ships and the invention of navigational devices such as the astrolabe and sextant made extended voyages possible.

A Faster Route to the East

But the most powerful inducement to exploration was trade. Marco Polo's famous journey to Cathay signaled Europe's "discovery" of Chinese and Islamic civilizations. The Orient became a magnet to traders, and exotic products and wealth flowed into Europe. Those who benefited most were merchants who sat astride the great overland trade routes, especially the merchants of the Italian city-states of Genoa, Venice and Florence.

The newly unified states of the Atlantic-France, Spain, England and Portugal-and their ambitious monarchs were envious of the merchants and princes who dominated the land routes to the East. Moreover, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, war between European states and the Ottoman Empire greatly hampered Europe's trade with the Orient. The desire to supplant the trade moguls, especially the Italians, and fear of the Ottoman Empire forced the Atlantic nations to search for a new route to the East.

Portugal: Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco de Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral

Portugal led the others into exploration. Encouraged by Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese seamen sailed southward along the African coast, seeking a water route to the East. They were also looking for a legendary king named Prester John who had supposedly built a Christian stronghold somewhere in northwestern Africa. Henry hoped to form an alliance with Prester John to fight the Muslims.

During Henry's lifetime the Portuguese learned much about the African coastal area. His school developed the quadrant, the cross-staff and the compass, made advances in cartography and designed and built highly maneuverable little ships known as caravels.

After Henry's death, Portuguese interest in long-distance trade and expansion waned until King John II commissioned Bartolomeu Dias to find a water route to India in 1487. Dias sailed around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean before his frightened crew forced him to give up the quest. A year later, Vasco da Gama succeeded in reaching India and returned to Portugal laden with jewels and spices.

In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral discovered and claimed Brazil for Portugal, and other Portuguese captains established trading posts in the South China Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea. These water routes to the East undercut the power of the Italian city-states, and Lisbon became Europe's new trade capital.

Spain and Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus launched Spain's imperial ambitions. Born in Genoa, Italy, around 1451, Columbus learned the art of navigation on voyages in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. At some point he probably read Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly's early fifteenth-century work, Imago mundi, which argued that the East could be found by sailing west of the Azores for a few days.

Columbus, hoping to make such a voyage, spent years seeking a sponsor and finally found one in Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain after they defeated the Moors and could turn their attention to other projects.

In August 1492, Columbus sailed west with his now famous ships, Niña, Pinta and Santa María. After ten weeks he sighted an island in the Bahamas, which he named San Salvador. Thinking he had found islands near Japan, he sailed on until he reached Cuba (which he thought was mainland China) and later Haiti.

Columbus returned to Spain with many products unknown to Europe-coconuts, tobacco, sweet corn, potatoes-and with tales of dark-skinned native peoples whom he called "Indians" because he assumed he had been sailing in the Indian Ocean.

Although Columbus found no gold or silver, he was hailed by Spain and much of Europe as the discoverer of d'Ailly's western route to the East. John II of Portugal, however, believed Columbus had discovered islands in the Atlantic already claimed by Portugal and took the matter to Pope Alexander II.

Twice the pope issued decrees supporting Spain's claim to Columbus's discoveries. But the territorial disputes between Portugal and Spain were not resolved until 1494 when they signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which drew a line 370 leagues west of the Azores as the demarcation between the two empires.

Despite the treaty, controversy continued over what Columbus had found. He made three more voyages to America between 1494 and 1502, during which he explored Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Each time he returned more certain that he had reached the East.

Subsequent explorations by others, however, persuaded most Europeans that Columbus had discovered a "New World." Ironically, that New World was named for someone else. A German geographer, Martin Waldseemüller, accepted the claim of Amerigo Vespucci that he had landed on the American mainland before Columbus. In 1507 Waldseemüller published a book in which he named the new land "America."

Spanish Explorers After Columbus

More Spanish expeditions followed. Juan Ponce de León explored the coasts of Florida in 1513. Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean in the same year.

Ferdinand Magellan's expedition (in the course of which he put down a mutiny and was later killed) sailed around the tip of South America, across the Pacific to the Philippines, through the Indian Ocean and back to Europe around the southern tip of Africa between 1519 and 1522.

Two expeditions led directly to Spain's emergence as sixteenth-century Europe's wealthiest and most powerful nation. The first was headed by Hernán Cortés, who in 1519 led a small army of Spanish and Native Americans against the Aztec Empire of Mexico. Completing the conquest in 1521, Cortés took control of the Aztecs' fabulous gold and silver mines.

Ten years later, an expedition under Francisco Pizarro overwhelmed the Inca Empire of Peru, securing for the Spaniards the great Inca silver mines of Potosí.

In 1535 and 1536, Pedro de Mendoza went as far as present-day Buenos Aires in Argentina, where he founded a colony. At the same time, Cabeza de Vaca explored the North American Southwest, adding that region to Spain's New World empire.

A few years later (1539-1542), Francisco Vásquez de Coronado discovered the Grand Canyon and journeyed through much of the Southwest looking for gold and the legendary Seven Cities of Cíbola. About the same time, Hernando de Soto explored southeastern North America from Florida to the Mississippi River. By 1650, Spain's empire was complete and fleets of ships were carrying the plunder back to Spain.

Religious Motivations

As European powers conquered the territories of the New World, they justified wars against Native Americans and the destruction of their cultures as a fulfillment of the European secular and religious vision of the New World. The idea of "America" antedated America's discovery and even Viking exploration.

That idea had two parts: one paradisiacal and utopian, the other savage and dangerous. Ancient tales described distant civilizations, usually to the west, where European-like peoples lived simple, virtuous lives without war, famine, disease or poverty. Such utopian visions were reinforced by religious notions. Early Christian Europeans had inherited from the Jews a powerful prophetic tradition that drew upon apocalyptic biblical texts in the books of Daniel, Isaiah and Revelations. They connected the Christianization of the world with the second coming of Christ. Such ideas led many Europeans (including Columbus) to believe it was God's plan for Christians to convert pagans wherever they were found.

If secular and religious traditions evoked utopian visions of the New World, they also induced nightmares. The ancients described wonderful civilizations, but barbaric, evil ones as well. Moreover, late medieval Christianity inherited a rich tradition of hatred for non-Christians derived in part from the Crusaders' struggle to free the Holy Land and from warfare against the Moors.

European encounters with the New World were viewed in light of these preconceived notions. To plunder the New World of its treasures was acceptable because it was populated by pagans. To Christianize the pagans was necessary because it was part of God's plan; to kill them was right because they were Satan's warriors.

France: Giovanni da Verrazano, Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain

While Spain was building its New World empire, France was also exploring the Americas. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano was commissioned to locate a northwest passage around North America to India. He was followed in 1534 by Jacques Cartier, who explored the St. Lawrence River as far as present-day Montreal.

In 1562, Jean Ribault headed an expedition that explored the St. Johns River area in Florida. His efforts were followed two years later by a second venture headed by René Goulaine de Laudonnière. But the Spanish soon pushed the French out of Florida, and thereafter, the French directed their efforts north and west. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain built a fort at Quebec and explored the area north to Port Royal and Nova Scotia and south to Cape Cod.

Unlike Spain's empire, "New France" produced no caches of gold and silver. Instead, the French traded with inland tribes for furs and fished off the coast of Newfoundland. New France was sparsely populated by trappers and missionaries and dotted with military forts and trading posts. Although the French sought to colonize the area, the growth of settlements was stifled by inconsistent policies.

Initially, France encouraged colonization by granting charters to fur-trading companies. Then, under Cardinal Richelieu, control of the empire was put in the hands of the government-sponsored Company of New France. The company, however, was not successful, and in 1663 the king took direct control of New France. Although more prosperous under this administration, the French empire failed to match the wealth of New Spain or the growth of neighboring British colonies.

The Netherlands: Henry Hudson Leads the Dutch

The Dutch were also engaged in the exploration of America. Formerly a Protestant province of Spain, the Netherlands was determined to become a commercial power and saw exploration as a means to that end.

In 1609, Henry Hudson led an expedition to America for the Dutch East India Company and laid claim to the area along the Hudson River as far as present-day Albany. In 1614 the newly formed New Netherland Company obtained a grant from the Dutch government for the territory between New France and Virginia. About ten years later another trading company, the West India Company, settled groups of colonists on Manhattan Island and at Fort Orange. The Dutch also planted trading colonies in the West Indies.

England: John Cabot and Sir Walter Raleigh

In 1497 Henry VII of England sponsored an expedition to the New World headed by John Cabot, who explored a part of Newfoundland and reported an abundance of fish. But until Queen Elizabeth's reign, the English showed little interest in exploration, being preoccupied with their European trade and establishing control over the British Isles.

By the mid-sixteenth century, however, England had recognized the advantages of trade with the East, and in 1560 English merchants enlisted Martin Frobisher to search for a northwest passage to India. Between 1576 and 1578 Frobisher as well as John Davis explored along the Atlantic coast.

Thereafter, Queen Elizabeth granted charters to Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh to colonize America. Gilbert headed two trips to the New World. He landed on Newfoundland but was unable to carry out his intention of establishing military posts. A year later, Raleigh sent a company to explore territory he named Virginia after Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen," and in 1585, he sponsored a second voyage, this time to explore the Chesapeake Bay region. By the seventeenth century, the English had taken the lead in colonizing North America, establishing settlements all along the Atlantic coast and in the West Indies.

Sweden and Denmark

Sweden and Denmark also succumbed to the attractions of America, although to a lesser extent. In 1638, the Swedish West India Company established a settlement on the Delaware River near present-day Wilmington called Fort Christina. This colony was short-lived, however, and was taken over by the Dutch in 1655. The king of Denmark chartered the Danish West India Company in 1671, and the Danes established colonies in St. Croix and other islands in the cluster of the Virgin Islands.

Sources

Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, a.d. 500-1600 (1971); John H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (1966; 2nd ed., 1980); David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620, from the Bristol Voyages of the Fifteenth Century to the Pilgrim Settlement at Plymouth: The Exploration, Exploitation, and Trial-and-Error Colonization of North America by the English (1974).

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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The first attempt by Europeans to colonize the New World occurred around1000 A.D. when the Vikings sailed from the British Isles to Greenland, established a colony and then moved on to Labrador, the Baffin Islands and finally Newfoundland.

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Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was quite a guy. Some things to describe him are printer, inventor, statesman, and scientist. He not only played an influential role in the Revolutionary War era and the fight for American independence but also helped to shape the U.S. Constitution and vision for the new nation. He is also on the $100 bill and continues to be honored for his accomplishments.

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The origin of Political Parties in the U.S. began during the struggle for ratification of the constitution. The friction increased as they shifted to the making of a new federal government.

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Political factions or parties began to form during the struggle over ratification of the federal Constitution of 1787. Friction between them increased as attention shifted from the creation of a new federal government to the question of how powerful that federal government would be. The Federalists, led by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, wanted a strong central government, while the Anti-Federalists, led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, advocated states' rights instead of centralized power. Federalists coalesced around the commercial sector of the country while their opponents drew their strength from those favoring an agrarian society. The ensuing partisan battles led George Washington to warn of "the baneful effects of the spirit of party" in his Farewell Address as president of United States.

"Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally."

George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
Amending the Constitution

Roger Sherman (1721-1793), a congressman from Connecticut, argued in a special congressional committee appointed on July 21, 1789, that any amendments should be appended to the Constitution. On August 19, 1789, the House of Representatives finally adopted Shermans argument that to insert them into the text would be too confusing and voted instead to add the amendments by way of a supplement.

This list of proposed amendments in Shermans writing is probably a draft of a report by a committee on which he served. It differs markedly from the amendments finally proposed and sent to the states. As such, it provides valuable insights into the creation of the Bill of Rights.

Republican Party Christened by James Madison

In September 1792, James Madison coined the term Republican Party in an essay, A Candid State of Parties, published in the National Gazette of Philadelphia. Although the Jeffersonian-Republican Party drew strength from the Anti-Federalists, no one had more claim to the authorship of the federal Constitution than did Madison, one of the founders of the Jeffersonian-Republican Party.

John Jay

John Jay (1745-1829), a prominent New York nationalist and former president of the Continental Congress, was among the first to call for a National Convention to replace or revise the Articles of Confederation. Jay was an outspoken advocate for the new Constitution and authored several of the Federalist essays. He served as first chief justice of the United States, 1789-1795. President Washington sent Jay to England in 1794 to negotiate a treaty, which became known as "Jay's Treaty."

Factional Fighting after Washington's Farewell

Despite George Washington's warning about the dangers of political factions or parties in his Farewell Address to the nation in 1796, the lack of a consensus candidate to assume the presidency only intensified party struggles. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson led partisan political factions or parties into the national elections of 1796. Washington even sought advice from two opposing partisan leaders, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Displayed here is a draft of Washington's Farewell Address, which Hamilton helped write.

Seeking Women's Rights

American women, such as Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, hoped the American Revolution would lead to more legal and political rights for women. During the post- Revolutionary period, periodicals aimed directly at women emerged. The best known was The Lady's Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, founded in Philadelphia in 1792. In this engraving, a copy of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), the cornerstone feminist document, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is presented to Lady Liberty.

Political Rights of Women Asserted

In a letter to her sister, Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody (1750-1815) of Aktinson, New Hampshire, Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, asserted the rights of women to judge the conduct of government, even if a woman does not hold the Reigns of government.

Ongoing, Undeclared Naval War

During the administration of President John Adams, the United States was engaged in an ongoing, undeclared naval war with France over neutral shipping rights. French naval vessels and privateers seized hundreds of American vessels, like the frigate Philadelphia pictured here, while the United States struggled to build a navy capable of defending its commerce.

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Creating the United States Formation of Political Parties

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Political factions or parties began to form during the struggle over ratification of the federal Constitution of 1787. Friction between them increased as attention shifted from the creation of a new federal government to the question of how powerful that federal government would be.

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The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson in the summer of 1776 and formally adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. It proclaims the colonies’ desire for independence from Great Britain and lists several grievances against the actions of King George. Jefferson split the Declaration into five sections: an introduction, a preamble, a body with two subsections, and a conclusion. The Declaration’s affirmation that “all men are created equal” has been an ideal for the country to live up to since 1776, when “all men” referred only to white, wealthy, Christian men. In the centuries since, various movements have challenged Americans to fulfill that ideal and give equal rights to marginalized groups. For instance, in 1848, early women’s rights activists modeled their “Declaration of Sentiments” after the Declaration of Independence, writing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.” The Declaration was also referenced often during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Many activists based their appeals for racial equality in the document’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”

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The Declaration of Independence, EXPLAINED [AP Government FOUNDATIONAL Documents]

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The ownership of a person used for forced labor. These people where seen as property, they suffered inhumane conditions and compulsory work.

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Greece as a Classical Civilization had many contributions to today’s civilization. Most modern forms of government, namely Democracy, have been influenced by Greek political ideas, Greek sculptures and pottery have inspired many artists, as well as different forms of poetry have inspired several writers. Greece also inspired several sports and the first olympics, America’s language, philosophy, city states, architecture, art and astronomy.

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The term "classical Greece" refers to the period between the Persian Wars at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. and the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. The classical period was an era of war and conflict-first between the Greeks and the Persians, then between the Athenians and the Spartans-but it was also an era of unprecedented political and cultural achievement. Besides the Parthenon and Greek tragedy, classical Greece brought us the historian Herodotus, the physician Hippokrates and the philosopher Socrates. It also brought us the political reforms that are ancient Greece's most enduring contribution to the modern world: the system known as demokratia, or "rule by the people."

Persian Wars

Led by Athens and Sparta, the Greek city-states were engaged in a great war with the Persian Empire at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. In 498 B.C., Greek forces sacked the Persian city of Sardis. In 490 B.C., the Persian king sent a naval expedition across the Aegean to attack Athenian troops in the Battle of Marathon. Despite a resounding Athenian victory there, the Persians did not give up. In 480 B.C., the new Persian king sent a massive army across the Hellespont to Thermopylae, where 60,000 Persian troops defeated 5,000 Greeks in the Battle of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas of Sparta was famously killed. The year after that, however, the Greeks defeated the Persians for good at the Battle of Salamis.

Did you know? The first democracy originated in classical Greece. The Greek word demokratia means "rule by the people."

The Rise of Athens

The defeat of the Persians marked the beginning of Athenian political, economic and cultural dominance. In 507 B.C., the Athenian nobleman Cleisthenes had overthrown the last of the autocratic tyrants and devised a new system of citizen self-governance that he called demokratia. In Cleisthenes' democratic system, every male citizen older than 18 was eligible to join the ekklesia, or Assembly, the sovereign governing body of Athens. Other legislators were chosen randomly by lot, not by election. And in this early Greek democracy, officials were sworn to act "according to the laws what is best for the people."

However, demokratia did not mean that Athens approached her relationships with other Greek city-states with anything approaching egalitarianism. To protect far-flung Greek territories from Persian interference, Athens organized a confederacy of allies that it called the Delian League in 478 B.C. Athens was clearly in charge of this coalition; as a result, most Delian League dues wound up in the city-state's own treasury, where they helped make Athens into a wealthy imperial power.

Athens Under Pericles

In the 450s, the Athenian general Pericles consolidated his own power by using all that tribute money to serve the citizens of Athens, rich and poor. (Generals were among the only public officials in Athens who were elected, not appointed, and who could keep their jobs for more than one year.) For example, Pericles paid modest wages to jurors and members of the ekklesia so that, in theory, everyone who was eligible could afford to participate in the public life of the demokratia.

Art and Architecture

Pericles also used the tribute money to support Athenian artists and thinkers. For instance, he paid to rebuild the parts of Athens that the Persian Wars had destroyed. The result was the magnificent Parthenon, a new temple in honor of the goddess Athena at the Acropolis. (Pericles also oversaw the construction of the temple at Hephaestos, the Odeion concert hall and the temple of Poseidon at Attica.)
READ MORE: How the Ancient Greeks Designed the Parthenon to Impress-And Last
Likewise, Pericles paid for the annual production of comedic and dramatic plays at the Acropolis. (Wealthy people offset some of these costs by paying voluntary taxes called liturgies.) Dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the comic playwright Aristophanes all won a great deal of renown for their depictions of relationships between men and gods, citizens and polis and fate and justice.

These plays, like the Parthenon, still epitomize the cultural achievements of classical Greece. Along with the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides and the ideas of the physician Hippokrates, they are defined by logic, pattern and order and a faith in humanism above all else. These are the attributes that today are associated with the art, the culture and even the politics of the era.

The Peloponnesian War

Unfortunately, none of these cultural achievements translated into political stability. Athenian imperialism had alienated its partners in the Delian League, particularly Sparta, and this conflict played out in the decades-long Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.).

The eventual Spartan victory in the Peloponnesian War meant that Athens lost its political primacy, but Athenian cultural life-the essence of classical Greece-continued apace in the fourth century B.C.. By the second half of the century, however, disorder reigned within the former Athenian empire. This disorder made possible the conquest of Greece by the Macedonian kings Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great (338-323 B.C.)-a conquest that eventually heralded the end of the classical period and the beginning of Hellenistic one.

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The term "classical Greece" refers to the period between the Persian Wars at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. and the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. The classical period was an era of war and conflict-first between the Greeks and the Persians, then between the Athenians and the Spartans-but it was also an era of unprecedented political and cultural achievement.

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The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern United States to territory that had been “reserved” for them west of the Mississippi River. This journey was hard, people starved, there was lots of disease, exposure to elements, and a high death toll from travel, lack of nutrients, and some from the military guards.

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Trail of Tears | We Shall Remain | PBS LearningMedia

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In this video segment adapted from American Experience: “We Shall Remain,” reenactments help tell the story of how the Cherokee people were forced from their lands in the southeast. The U.S. government initially promised the Cherokee and other Native American tribes that if they could assimilate into European Americans lifestyles, they would be considered equals. But a new movement in the late 1820s, supported by President Andrew Jackson, promoted removal of Native Americans from the eastern U.S. The Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, called for the tribes to leave peacefully. Feeling that removal from their own lands was not an option, the vast majority of people stayed. When the deadline to leave passed, federal troops and state militia forcefully assembled the Cherokee people, letting them take nothing but the clothes on their backs, and made them march an 850-mile trek to new lands. Many died on this march, known as the Trail of Tears, which lasted through one of the hardest winters the region had ever experienced.

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King George III was important to American Independence because he consented to hiring thousands of Hessian mercenaries, or German soldiers, to fight alongside the British soldiers, who were already in America to fight in what is known as the Revolutionary War, which lasted 8 years.

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George III: The King Who Lost the Colonies

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Thomas Jefferson was important to American Independence because he drafted the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776, he also later wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, the bill was enacted in 1786.

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Few members of the founding generation rank with Thomas Jefferson in the defining of the American Revolution for contemporaries and the shaping its legacy for posterity. His legion of accomplishments includes his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, his service as America's first Secretary of State and its third President, and his establishment of the University of Virginia.

He was born at Shadwell in Albemarle County, Virginia, on April 2, 1743 (o.s.), as the oldest son of surveyor and planter Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph. Living on the western edge of the settled region of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was educated at local schools run by Anglican ministers. He spent five years with the Rev. William Douglas, a Scot from whom Jefferson learned Latin and Greek and some French, and another two years under the Rev. James Maury. Jefferson's father died in 1757, and his will split his land, livestock, and slaves between Jefferson and his brother, Randolph. Jefferson also received his father's small and eclectic library, his scientific instruments, and a cherry-tree desk.

In March 1760 Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary to continue his studies in Greek and Latin, gain a better understanding of mathematics, and obtain "a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable" to him than if he stayed "at the Mountains." He remained at William and Mary for two years and studied mainly with William Small, a Scottish intellectual less than ten years older than Jefferson. Small introduced Jefferson to a learned local lawyer, George Wythe, and to Virginia's erudite Lieutenant Governor, Francis Fauquier. The four often dined together, and Jefferson later recalled that "to the habitual conversations on these occasions" he owed much instruction. In April 1762 Jefferson left William and Mary to study law under Wythe, although he appears to have split his time as a law student between Shadwell and Williamsburg, where he was expected by Wythe to "attend constantly" the sessions of the courts. He was in Williamsburg for the debate in the House of Burgesses over the Stamp Act in May 1765, during which he was impressed with the arguments and passion of Patrick Henry. The following year Jefferson took his only pre-Revolutionary War trip outside Virginia when he traveled to Philadelphia in May to be inoculated against smallpox. He was back in Virginia by October, when he tried his first legal case.

Jefferson's political career began in 1769 when the voters of Albemarle County elected him to the House of Burgesses - a seat he would keep for the rest of the colonial period. His career immediately became immersed in the American Revolution, as Fauquier's successor, the Baron de Botetourt, dissolved the assembly after only nine days because of its strong resolutions adopted against the Townshend Duties. The Burgesses' resolutions denied Parliament's authority to levy taxes in Virginia. Jefferson and his fellow representatives then met at the Raleigh Tavern and agreed to George Mason's proposal to not import or purchase a long list of British goods after September 1. The House of Burgesses reconvened when it was announced that all the Townshend Duties except the one on tea would be repealed.

As the transatlantic political debate quieted down somewhat, Jefferson focused his attention on building his legal practice and his personal life, but the imperial controversy was never far away. In February 1770 much of Shadwell burned, taking most of his books and papers with it. This loss caused him to redouble efforts to build his own home, which he first called the Hermitage but then renamed Monticello. On June 22, he signed another non-importation association and five days later endorsed a petition to the King that asked him to end Parliament's pretensions to tax Americans. In November Jefferson "removed to the mountain" where he had "but one room, which, like the coblar's, serves me for parlour for kitchen and hall" and "for bedchamber and study, too." On January 1, 1772, he married the widow Martha Wayles Skelton, and in 1773 he became one of the largest slaveowners in Albemarle County when his father-in-law's will added 135 slaves - and a considerable amount of debt - to Jefferson's modest holdings.

In 1773 transatlantic politics rumbled again. During the March session of Virginia's assembly, word arrived that the British government answered the burning of a revenue ship in Rhode Island, the Gaspée, by appointing a royal commission empowered to send suspects to London for trial. On the evening of March 11, Jefferson met with Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee, and Dabney Carr at the Raleigh Tavern and agreed to try to establish a committee of correspondence to communicate with the other colonies. Jefferson later recalled of that night, "We were all sensible that the most urgent of all measures was that of coming to an understanding with all the other colonies, to consider the British claims as a common cause to all, and to produce a unity of action." Carr, Jefferson's brother-in-law and best friend, proposed the resolution in the assembly the next day. Jefferson and Carr set out for home together after the governor ended that session, and the two agreed along the way that the committee would unite all the colonies "in the same principles and measures for the maintenance of our rights."

After news of the Coercive Acts reached Virginia in 1774, Jefferson gave up his legal practice to devote himself full-time to politics (he turned all his cases over to Edmund Randolph). Upon hearing of the Boston Port Act, he joined with Henry, Lee, and others to establish the day that Boston's port was set to close as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer for the burgesses. The House agreed on May 24 to the action for June 1. Upon learning of the move, Lord Dunmore, the governor who succeeded Botetourt, dissolved the assembly for fear that more strident measures to challenge the authority of Parliament would surely follow. Dunmore was right. Meeting in the Raleigh Tavern the next day, Jefferson and the former Burgesses agreed to another association to halt the importation of British goods. They also called for a continental congress, declaring "that an attack, made on one of our sister colonies, to compel submission to arbitrary taxes, is an attack made on all British America." After the tavern meeting, Jefferson composed a printed call to his Albemarle County constituents to observe the June 1 fast day. In July he was elected to the First Virginia Convention and drafted the Albemarle Resolves, which proclaimed that "no other Legislature whatever can rightly exercise authority over them; and that these privileges they hold as the common rights of mankind."

Jefferson refined and expanded the argument of the Albemarle Resolves in his first major political work, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, published first in Williamsburg on August 8, 1774, and then in London only weeks later. It was intended as an instruction to Virginia's delegates to the First Continental Congress but was essentially a strident letter to George III that proclaimed America's independence from Parliament (although not from the King). The reasoning was based on an individual's act of emigration (an argument first articulated by Virginia's Richard Bland). The work established Jefferson's reputation as a radical patriot leader - one too radical to be chosen by his fellow Virginians as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. He was selected only as an alternate to the Second Continental Congress.

He was in Williamsburg in early June 1775 when Peyton Randolph, the Speaker of the House of Burgesses, asked him to draft the House's response to Lord North's conciliatory proposals. Jefferson's rejection of the ministry's final attempt to ward off war was adopted by the House, but not without "a dash of cold water on it here and there, enfeebling it somewhat." He was in Philadelphia just a few weeks later to fill a vacancy in Virginia's delegation to the Continental Congress. Jefferson was asked to draft the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. John Dickinson thought it too harsh, and William Livingston believed it possessed "little sense or dignity." So Dickinson substantially revised it before it was accepted by the Congress and given to George Washington, on his way to command the Continental army outside of Boston, for publication there.

On June 11, 1776, Jefferson was appointed to a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. It was adopted in July by the Continental Congress -- but not without significant changes that, according to Edmund Pendleton in Virginia, "altered it much for the worse." Nevertheless, the document transformed Jefferson's political creed "that all men are created equal" into that of the American nation, and it still serves as the basis of his legacy and enduring relevance.

Jefferson then gave up his seat in Congress to return to Virginia "to establish a government truly republican" and remove any trace "of ancient or future aristocracy." He laid out a plan that would eliminate laws that restricted the inheritance of property, ensure the separation between church and state, create a system of general education, and gradually emancipate slaves. Elected a member of the new House of Delegates by October 1776, he was assigned, along with his old law teacher, George Wythe, to a committee to revise Virginia's laws - and its society. Most of his ideas were represented in the 126 laws submitted by the committee to the House on June 18, 1778. By 1786, almost all of his legislative goals had been achieved. While his plan for general education and gradual slave emancipation were never adopted, in December 1779 Jefferson did succeed in reorganizing the curriculum and faculty of the College of William and Mary.

Jefferson became the second democratically-elected Governor of Virginia, succeeding Patrick Henry on June 1, 1779. One of his first acts was to approve a bill he wrote to move the state capital from Williamsburg to Richmond. He considered the old city was too vulnerable to a coastal British attack and believed a new republican government required a neo-classical edifice that could be only erected in a new location. Jefferson had only a few months to enjoy the change of scenery, as the landing of an invasion force under British Brigadier General Benedict Arnold in December 1780 caught the government completely off-guard. Because the governor's office created by the Virginia constitution in 1776 was exceptionally weak in executive authority, Jefferson could do little to oppose Arnold's movements up the James River to Richmond. Arnold occupied the city in January 1781 and caused the government to flee west to Charlottesville. For much of the next six months, Arnold faced little opposition in the state from either militia or Continental forces under the Marquis de Lafayette and the Baron von Steuben. Major General Charles Cornwallis' British army from the Carolinas created more concern when it entered Virginia in May. Colonel John Graves Simcoe and Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton were sent to threaten Steuben's supplies and strike at the heart of the state government with a raid on Charlottesville. They succeeded on both counts, nearly capturing Jefferson and most of the legislature on June 4. Jefferson's term as governor ended on June 3, so he did not proceed farther west to Staunton, where the assembly reconvened. That led to criticism of Jefferson's wartime leadership and calls for an investigation into his administration. Neither were seriously pursued, and both houses of the legislature voted Jefferson their thanks in December.

Jefferson remained out of public office for the next two years to spend the time with his family. This was when he wrote much of the only book he would publish, Notes on the State of Virginia. It covers a wide range of topics, from Virginia's natural history to the weaknesses of its constitution. Jefferson's reflections on slavery would prove the source of the most persistent criticism of Jefferson's ideas. He questioned whether black people, as a race, were mentally "inferior" to whites, the result of an unfortunate racial condition "fixed in nature." The Notes also supply Jefferson's scientific conjectures in answer to the questions posed in an inquisition of all things animal, vegetable and mineral in Virginia by the French government at the beginning of the American Revolution. He also suffered a major personal blow during this period with the death of his wife on September 6, 1782, an event that Edmund Randolph reported to James Madison "has left our friend inconsolable." Madison replied to Randolph that "this domestic catastrophe may prove in its operation beneficial to his country by weening him from those attachments which deprived it of his services." Madison suggested Randolph urge Jefferson to accept a diplomatic post "as soon as his sensibility will bear." Jefferson eventually yielded to such calls for him to return to public life. After spending almost a year back in Congress, where he saw firsthand the weakness of the Confederation government, he went to France as an ambassador in the summer of 1784.

Jefferson's time in Paris changed his political life as the experience sharpened his commitment to republicanism and, more critically, to democracy. Jefferson saw Shays' Rebellion as a democratic revolt in defense of liberty, excusing the violence by declaring to John Adams that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." He believed the subsequent Constitutional Convention was an overreaction, but he corresponded extensively with Madison over its form and expressed his deep concern over its lack of a bill of rights. Jefferson was still in France in July 1789 when the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille and the capitulation of Louis XVI. He returned to America in September before the convulsion entered its bloodier phases.

In December 1789 Jefferson accepted a position in the federal government under the new Constitution as the first Secretary of State. American political culture was then in the midst of dramatic changes as partisan warfare between Federalists and Republicans broke out in earnest, especially in the growing American press. Alexander Hamilton faced off against Jefferson and Madison while President George Washington attempted to hold on to a nonpartisan government. The almost constant battles between Hamilton and Jefferson over financial and diplomatic affairs took their toll on the Virginian, and he resigned in January 1794 to return to Monticello.

In 1796 Jefferson ran for President but finished second to John Adams and settled for the office of Vice President. He played almost no role in a Federalist government dominated by Anglophiles and still heavily influenced by Hamilton. A Quasi-War against France threatened in 1798 to become an all-out war and prompted debates that would echo for decades. Congress passed four bills that have become known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Jefferson believed were a direct assault on the civil liberties and therefore an attack on the legacy of the American Revolution. The Sedition Act was especially heinous to Jefferson because it targeted the Republican press by making it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government. Jefferson and James Madison responded on behalf of Virginia and Kentucky to write "a solemn protest" against the acts. Based on a clearly stated presumption of loyalty to the Union, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves declared it the right of any state to judge for itself whether any act passed by Congress was unconstitutional and therefore "null and void" (although Jefferson used the word "nullify" only once, they established the concept of nullification in American political culture and were co-opted by many southerners as the legal justification for secession in 1860-1861). Adams avoided war with France, but the political damage was already done as Jefferson chose to run against Adams once more.

After a very close vote that went to 36 ballots in the House of Representatives, Jefferson was elected President in 1801, after what he called the "revolution of 1800." To him, the election "was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of '76 was in it's form" and resulted in a restoration of the government to the American people. The Louisiana Purchase is often considered the greatest achievement of his two terms in office. Other important events include the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the war against the Barbary pirates, the trial of Vice President Aaron Burr for treason, and Jefferson's ill-considered Embargo Acts.

On March 15, 1809, Jefferson returned to Monticello for good and vowed to stay out of public affairs. He lamented the War of 1812 because he believed it forever altered the destiny of the United States by shifting the nation's focus from peace and agriculture to defense and manufacturing. He hated the Supreme Court's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland for fostering a consolidation of federal power. The westward expansion of slavery represented by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 also gave him grave concerns over the future of the republic. He wrote that the Missouri question, "like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union."

There were highlights during his retirement, however, such as the creation of the University of Virginia in 1817. He died at Monticello on July 4, 1826.

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Few members of the founding generation rank with Thomas Jefferson in the defining of the American Revolution for contemporaries and the shaping its legacy for posterity. His legion of accomplishments includes his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, his service as America's first Secretary of State and its third President, and his establishment of the University of Virginia.

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The Articles of Confederation were created to make a weak central government that had very limited power. Most of the authority was within the individual states. Each state had sovereignty and equal representation in Congress. This formed the “league of friendship” between the states instead of a strong government.

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Articles of Confederation - Educational Social Studies History Video for Elementary Students & Kids

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The Bill of Rights impacted the development of American government because it addresses the concerns of the Anti-Federalists about overreach, public support for the Constitution, and guaranteeing individual liberties. These liberties include freedom of speech, religion, press, clear limitations on government power, and ensuring the citizens protection from government abuse.

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Bill of Rights ("I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" Parody) - @MrBettsClass

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The Westward Expansion involved several different components. The Louisiana Purchase was in 1803 when Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France, Manifest Destiny (moral objection to colonialism, the push westward), Indian Removal Act (removed Native Americans from their land), Economic Promise (economic promise convinced people to move west), Oregon and California trails, Mexican-American War (contributed to expansion), Oregon Territory Purchase (Oregon territory was purchased from Great Britain), and then the end of the Frontier which happened in 1893 which ended the period of the Westward Expansion.

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher's Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

In the nineteenth century, the United States expanded its territory westward at a dramatic pace, leading to conflict, national growth, and ongoing cultural exchange within a transformed continent.

Background

The expansion of the United States into the territory west of the Mississippi River began with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. President Thomas Jefferson nearly doubled the size of the nation by negotiating a price of $15 million to purchase 828,800 square miles from France, including all or part of 14 current states. In 1804, Jefferson sent an expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the area. The three-year expedition produced new understanding of the geography and resources of the western part of the continent. In the 1830s and 1840s, "manifest destiny", the idea that the United States was destined to expand across the entire continent, was used to promote further territorial expansion. And the nation expanded quickly:

In 1845 the United States annexed Texas;

In 1846 the Oregon Treaty ended British claims to Oregon Territory;

In 1848, following the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded much of the Southwest to the United States;

In 1853 the United States bought an additional tract of land from Mexico.

States joined the Union at a relatively fast pace: California became a state in 1850 and Oregon in 1859, Nevada in 1864, Nebraska in 1867, Colorado in 1876, South and North Dakota, Montana, and Washington in 1889, Wyoming and Idaho in 1890, and Utah in 1896. As new towns like Denver and Phoenix sprang up in these new states, established towns and cities grew to accommodate the new industries and new populations that westward expansion brought with it.

A number of factors fueled migration west. Trappers, settlers, and miners headed West from the eastern United States prior to the Civil War. The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, allowed settlers to claim 160 acres of land for free. Another important factor was completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869; the railroad led to much more rapid western migration and also facilitated economic development.

In looking at the history of the American West, it is important to keep in mind the myths that arose around the settling of the West in the second half of the nineteenth century. The influential historian Frederick Jackson Turner described a uniquely American personality forged by the experience of taming the wilderness and critical to the success and growth of the United States. That view of the West as a frontier where heroic white settlers and cowboys struggled to bring civilization to a savage land framed popular and scholarly thinking for years to come.

More recently, however, historians have questioned the notion of the frontier. Instead, they have argued that the nineteenth-century West was a crossroads of cultures. The trans-Mississippi West was home to countless Native American communities. The lifeways of the Native American groups varied considerably. Some with nomadic lifestyles required large amounts of rangeland to maintain their families; other groups lived in settled communities, where they farmed and raised livestock brought to the West by the Spanish. The cultural diversity was heightened by the addition of tens of thousands of Native Americans forced west from the eastern areas of the United States.

Spain ruled what is today the southwestern United States between 1598 and 1821; it used land grants to promote settlement and protect this remote region of its empire. Spanish policy was to give settlers free land owned by the government. The Republic of Mexico followed many of the same policies when it governed the Southwest between 1821 and 1848.

Thus, when white settlers began pouring into the West, they were entering a region in which indigenous peoples and Spanish settlers had been living for hundreds of years. Nor was east the only direction from which settlers came into the American West.

African Americans came from the southeast, Spanish settlers came from Mexico in the south, and workers came from the west, across the Pacific from China.

The hope for economic advancement that brought white settlers to the West also brought workers from Asia. Chinese immigrants worked in mining, ran small businesses, and helped build railroads across the West; however, they were often met with hostility and violent attacks when they attempted to settle into communities.

Expansion in the American West continues today, as its population centers continue to expand into even the most remote areas of the region. Cultural encounters also continue to have an impact on everyday life in the United States, and may prove to be among the most important legacies of the great era of westward expansion.

Suggestions for Teachers

The documents in this set can be used to help students explore westward expansion of the United States and the resulting interactions among the West's many cultural groups.

Students could imagine that they are settlers from the East or Midwest, journeying to the West to start a new home. Using documents from this set to provide background information, they could write letters home, describing encounters with people or places described or depicted in the documents. What do they learn about the West from each encounter? Completing the Transcontinental Railroad was one of the most important events in connecting the West to other parts of United States. Challenge students to use a map to decide where they would build a railroad from the Midwest to California. Where would they start? Where would they end? What route would they follow? When they have drawn their route, ask to compare it with a Library of Congress map of one of the completed railways. How close was their route to the actual route? Perspectives on westward expansion varied dramatically when it was taking place. Challenge students to examine a positive representation of westward expansion and to speculate about the point of view of its creator. Then, they might find a document or image in the Library's online collections that represents a different point of view, and identify the ways in which the two items disagree. Documents in the Library of Congress online collections provide evidence of conflict among the cultural groups that met each other in the American West. Challenge students to find evidence of conflict and prejudice in the documents in this primary source set. Can they also find evidence of cooperation and acceptance? What factors might have led to conflict or cooperation in each instance?

Additional Resources

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Westward Expansion: Encounters at a Cultural Crossroads | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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In the nineteenth century, the United States expanded its territory westward at a dramatic pace, leading to conflict, national growth, and ongoing cultural exchange within a transformed continent.

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The abolitionist movement was a campaign to end slavery from 139-1870. The women’s movement was focused on supporting the war while advocating for abolition. The Fugitive Slave Act was a law passed in 1850 and it required the return of escaped slaves even if the were originally free. The Dred Scott case was a case in the Supreme Court which said the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and denied the legality of black citizenship in America, it also held up slavery in the United States Territories.

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The Compromise of 1850

In the wake of the Mexican War, tensions developed between the North and South over whether the western land gained by the U.S. should become free or slave territory. Things came to a head when California sought approval to enter the Union as a free state in 1849, which would have upset the balance struck by the Missouri Compromise several decades before. Senator Henry Clay, a Whig from Kentucky, proposed a package of legislation to resolve the disputes, but the Senate-after seven months of discussions-rejected his proposal.

Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, came up with an alternative proposal that admitted California, established Utah and New Mexico as territories that could decide for themselves whether to permit slavery, defined boundaries for the state of Texas, abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and obligated the entire country to cooperate in the capture and return of escaped slaves. But the deal only postponed the conflict.

"They didn't really compromise," says Michael Green, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of several books on the Civil War era, including Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War and Lincoln and the Election of 1860. "They just agreed to disagree."

The Fugitive Slave Act

An existing federal law, enacted by Congress in 1793, allowed local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners, and imposed penalties upon anyone who aided their flight. But the new version included in the Compromise of 1850 went much further, by compelling citizens to assist in capturing escapees, denying the captives the right to a jury trial, and increasing the penalty for anyone aiding their escape. It also put cases in the hands of federal commissioners who got $10 if a fugitive was returned, but only $5 if an alleged slave was determined to be a free Black.

Northern abolitionists rebelled against the law. After 50,000 anti-slavery protesters filled the streets of Boston to protest the arrest of a Black man named Anthony Burns in 1854, President Franklin Pierce sent federal troops to maintain order and provided a Navy ship to return Burns back to Virginia.

"Northerners who had questioned slavery said, 'We told you so,' and those who hadn't thought to themselves, 'This is going too far,'" says Green. "It's a radicalizing moment." As a result, Massachusetts and other free states began passing "personal liberty" laws, which made it difficult and costly for enslavers to prove their cases in court.

'Uncle Tom's Cabin' Is Published

In 1851, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was still grieving the loss of her 18-month-old son Samuel to cholera two years earlier, wrote to the publisher of a Washington, D.C.-based abolitionist newspaper, National Era, and offered to write a fictional serial about the cruelty of slavery. Stowe later explained that losing her child helped her to understand "what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is ripped away from her," according to Stowe biographer Katie Griffiths.

Stowe's story, published in 41 installments, boosted the paper's circulation, and a Boston publisher decided to release it as a two-volume novel. Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly sold 300,000 copies in its first year, and the vociferous public debate about the book exacerbated the differences between the North and South. Northerners were shocked by the brutal depiction of slavery, which Stowe had synthesized from published autobiographies of slaves and stories she had heard from friends and fugitive Blacks. In turn, "Southerners react noisily to it," Green explains. "They're saying, 'This is terrible. You're attacking us. You're all against us.'" When Stowe visited the White House in 1862, President Lincoln asked, "So this is the little lady who made this big war?"

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1854, Senator Douglas, the author of the Compromise of 1850, introduced another piece of legislation "to organize the Territory of Nebraska," an area that covered not just that present-day state but also Kansas, as well as Montana and the Dakotas, according to the U.S. Senate's history of the law. Douglas was promoting a transcontinental railroad that would pass through Chicago in his home state. But the envisioned northern route had to pass through the Nebraska territory, a place where slavery was prohibited by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Rivals, including slave owners, wanted a southern route.

To get what he wanted, Douglas offered a compromise, which would allow settlers in those territories to decide whether to legalize slavery. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, an opponent of slavery, attacked the proposal for creating "a dreary region of despotism." Nevertheless it was passed by Congress, with cataclysmic results.

"It re-opened that land to the expansion of slavery, and destroyed a long-established political compromise on the issue of slavery in the West," Phillips says. Pro-slavery and antislavery activists surged into the territories in an effort to sway the vote, and clashed violently in a conflict that became known as "Bleeding Kansas," which foreshadowed the Civil War.

The Pottawatomie Massacre

One of those who went to Kansas was a radical abolitionist and religious zealot named John Brown, who had worked as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and founded an organization that helped slaves escape to Canada. Brown moved to Kansas Territory, where in May 1856, he was angered by the destruction of a newspaper office and other property in Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery forces. Brown decided retaliation was in order.

At a spot near a crossing on Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin, Kansas, Brown, four of his sons and several others lured five proslavery men out of their houses with a promise that they would not be harmed, and then slashed and stabbed them with a saber and shot them in the head, according to a contemporary account of the attack. Brown's brutality was denounced by Southern newspapers and by some Northern ones as well, and it "aroused emotions and distrust on both sides," as an article from the Kansas Historical Society notes. The fighting in Kansas continued for another two years.

The Dred Scott Decision

Dred Scott, an enslaved man, was born in Virginia and later lived in Alabama and Missouri. In 1831, his original enslaver died, and he was purchased by a U.S. Army surgeon named John Emerson. Emerson took him to the free state of Illinois and also Wisconsin, a territory where slavery was illegal due to the Missouri Compromise. During that time, Scott married and he and his wife had four children. In 1843, Emerson died, and several years after that, Scott and his wife sued Emerson's widow in federal court for their freedom on the grounds that they had lived in free territory.

Scott, who was assisted financially by the family of his original owner, endured years of litigation until the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In an 1857 decision written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the court decided that Scott was not entitled to U.S. citizenship and the protection of law, no matter where he had lived. In the court's view, the Constitution's framers had not intended for Black people to be free, but instead viewed them as property, with "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The ruling made further political compromise too difficult.

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

Brown dreamed of carrying out an even bigger attack, one that would ignite a mass uprising of Southern enslaved people. On a night in October 1859, he and a band of 22 men launched a raid on Harpers Ferry, a town in what is now West Virginia, and captured some prominent local citizens and seized the federal arsenal there. His small force soon was counterattacked by local militia, forcing him to seek refuge. The following afternoon, U.S. Marines under the command of then-Col. Robert E. Lee arrived and stormed the arsenal, killing many of Brown's men and capturing him. Brown was tried and charged with treason, murder and slave insurrection, and sentenced to death. He was hanged in December 1859. While the attack failed to trigger the widespread revolt he envisioned, it drove the North and South even further apart.

"Northern abolitionists who preferred pacificism praised Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom and even helped to finance his attack," Phillips explains. "Southerners expected more acts of terrorism and prepared by bolstering their militias." In many respects, Brown's raid could be viewed as the first battle of the Civil War, he says.

The Election of 1860

Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer who had served a single term in Congress, emerged in the mid-1850s as an articulate and persuasive critic of slavery, and achieved national prominence with a series of debates against Senator Stephen Douglas in an unsuccessful campaign for Douglas's seat. When the Republican Party held a convention to nominate a presidential candidate, the chosen location of Chicago gave Lincoln a home-court advantage over more experienced politicians such as Senator William H. Seward of New York.

"When they set up the convention floor, they put Illinois in a spot where they could get to the other delegations that were less committed," Green says. "The New York delegation, which was supporting Seward, was put in a corner where they couldn't get out." That made it difficult for them to negotiate and persuade others to support their candidate. In the general election, Lincoln caught more lucky breaks. After the Democrats were unable to decide upon a candidate, southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, while northerners nominated Douglas. Breckenridge and Constitutional Party Candidate John Bell split the South, while Lincoln swept the northeastern and midwestern states except for Missouri (which went to Douglas), as well as Oregon and California to win the presidency despite getting just 40 percent of the vote. "For the first time, the Electoral College worked against the South," Green explains.

The Formation of the Confederacy

The election of the first U.S. president who was a vocal opponent of slavery came as a shock to Southerners. "Now, there is going to be someone in the White House who is not going to do what the South says it wants done, reflexively," Green explains. "Their feeling is, no matter what Lincoln says about protecting our rights, he's not going to do that. We don't trust him. He's been elected by people who are out to get us."

Less than six weeks after the election, the first secession convention met in Charleston South Carolina. About 60 percent of the 169 delegates were slave owners, and they voted unanimously to leave the Union. Local residents celebrated with bonfires, parades and the ringing of church bells. Five more states-Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana-soon followed. Representatives from those six states met in February 1861 to establish a unified government, which they called the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected as Confederate President. Texas joined in March.

After Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in April and Lincoln called for federal forces to retake it, four more states-Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee-left the union and joined the Confederacy as well.

Though the Confederacy's leaders didn't realize it, they actually were hastening the end of what they sought to protect. "Had they stayed, slavery as an institution almost certainly would have survived much longer," Green says.

Instead, a four-year, bloody war devastated much of the South, took the lives of more than 650,000 from both sides, and led to the emancipation of more than 3.9 million enslaved Black Americans, in addition to changing the nation in numerous other ways.

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9 Events That Led to the Civil War | HISTORY

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The Civil War was a conflict many years in the making.

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The Great Depression was a world-wide economic crash. The Stock Market crashed and a lot of Americans lost their jobs, lost money, and it lasted from 1929-1941, which is 12 years. Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New Deal, which included a series of programs, reforms financially, new regulations, and some public work programs.

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New Deal - Programs, Social Security & FDR

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The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. A Second New Deal was put in place shortly thereafter as a way to continue the country’s economic recovery.

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While large-scale immigration created a lot of social tension, it also produced new growing populations in cities that the immigrants settled in. The newcomers helped transform American society and culture, demonstrating that diversity. The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census.

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The peace movement advocated for nonviolent resistance, no nuclear weapons, and cooperation internationally.There were peace movements during World War 1 between the World Wars, during World War 2, during the Cold War, during the Civil Rights Movement, and during the Vietnam War.

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Central conflict:

The Disagreement over the expansion of slavery into new territories, with the North largely opposed and the South strongly supporting it.

Secession:

Following Lincoln's election, several Southern states seceded from the Union, forming the Confederate States of America.

Major battles:

Important battles include the Battle of Fort Sumter (the first engagement), Battle of Antietam, Battle of Gettysburg (considered a turning point), Battle of Vicksburg (gaining control of the Mississippi River), and the Battle of Appomattox Court House (where Lee surrendered).

Emancipation Proclamation:

Issued by Lincoln, this document declared that enslaved people in Confederate territories would be freed, significantly changing the war's focus to include the abolition of slavery.

Outcome:

The Union ultimately defeated the Confederacy, leading to the end of slavery in the United States and a stronger federal government.

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When Southern rebels bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April 1861, it was the start of a war between the Union and the secessionist Confederate States of America that would stretch on for four bloody years.

The war took a brutal toll. According to statistics compiled by the National Park Service,110,100 men on the Union side lost their lives in combat and another 275,174 were wounded in action, while 94,000 Confederates were killed and another 194,026 were wounded. Still more soldiers died of disease, starvation and accidents, so that the total death toll may have been as high as 850,000, according to a 2011 analysis.

Today, when we think of the Civil War, the names of a few hallowed battlefields, such as Gettysburg and Shiloh, come to mind. But the conflict was far bigger and bloodier in scope. Union and Confederate forces met in more than 10,000 armed confrontations across the nation, ranging from small clashes to full-scale battles involving tens of thousands of soldiers, in locations from Vermont to Arizona.

"Evaluating the importance of a battle can be a tricky business," explains Jim Campi, a spokesman for the American Battlefield Trust, an organization that works to preserve historic battles sites across the nation and highlight their importance. "Battles are best assessed by their overall impact on the larger conflict-did it extend the war, or bring it closer to its conclusion; did it achieve a strategic objective, eliminate an enemy force or enable a combatant to bring more force to bear at a decisive point?"

Here are seven battles that proved pivotal in the American Civil War.

First Bull Run

July 21, 1861: Union Gen. Irvin McDowell marched out of Washington, D.C. into Virginia, intent on seizing the Confederate capital of Richmond and putting an end to the war. But most of McDowell's men were inexperienced, 90-day volunteers, who'd joined in expectation of a brief conflict and had little idea what was in store for them. They came up against a force commanded by Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard, which was defending a critical railroad junction at Manassas, Virginia. When McDowell's forces attacked, the Confederates initially were driven back, but reinforcements soon arrived, including a brigade led by then-Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, who would earn the nickname "Stonewall" for his tenacity in holding ground.

In the war's first major battle, Union forces were routed, with an estimated 2,896 killed, wounded, missing or captured. The victorious Confederates suffered 1,982 casualties of their own. As each side counted their dead, it became evident that the struggle ahead would be longer and more grisly than Americans had expected.

Fort Donelson

February 11-16, 1862: One of the first major Union victories was then-Brig. Gen Ulysses S. Grant's capture of Fort Donelson, located along the Cumberland River in Tennessee. The Confederates initially repulsed an attack by union gunboats, and planned a bold counterattack against the Union troops to clear a path for escape. The Confederates seemed on the verge of success when they halted and retreated to their fortifications. That gave Grant time to figure out a weak point in the Confederate line-and attack it.

Confederate generals Gideon Pillow and John B. Floyd fled, leaving behind 13,000 soldiers, who waved a white flag above their fortifications. When the rebels asked for terms of surrender, Grant replied that no terms "except unconditional and immediate surrender" would be acceptable. This earned him the nickname " Unconditional Surrender."

The victory, along with the capture of nearby Fort Henry, opened up the state of Tennessee to Union invasion, and helped turn Grant into a national hero.
EXPLORE: Ulysses S. Grant: An Interactive Map of His Key Civil War Battles
Antietam

September 17, 1862: Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia invaded Maryland in an attempt to knock the Union back on its heels. President Abraham Lincoln sent Maj. Gen. George McClellan and his Army of the Potomac to stop him.

The two forces initially collided at dawn in a cornfield in Sharpsburg, Maryland, where their movements were obscured by the tall corn stalks as they fired upon one another. The battle eventually shifted to a stone bridge along Antietam Creek, where Union troops had to storm a Confederate position three times before finally capturing it. An estimated 22,717 men on both sides were killed, wounded, captured or went missing.

Though the battle ended in a stalemate, the Union had stymied Lee's invasion. That gave Lincoln enough confidence to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which redefined the Civil War from a struggle to preserve the Union to one focused on ending slavery. Meanwhile, photographs by Alexander Gardner of bodies strewn on the battlefield, displayed in Matthew Brady 's gallery in New York, brought home to northerners the brutal cost of the war.
READ MORE: How Photographer Mathew Brady Highlighted Gruesome Realities of the Civil War
Chancellorsville

May 1-6, 1863: Lee achieved one of his greatest triumphs at Chancellorsville, Virginia, where he divided his forces and sent Lt. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson to force his way through a rough forest to outflank units led by Union Gen. Joseph Hooker. After several days of fighting, the Union troops were forced to retreat. By the end, Hooker had suffered more than 17,000 casualties to Lee's nearly 13,000.

It was a decisive victory for Lee and the South-but it came at a high cost. Among Lee's casualties was Jackson, one of the most capable Confederate officers. Jackson was wounded by friendly fire and died four days after the battle.
READ MORE: 7 Things You May Not Know About the Battle of Chancellorsville
Vicksburg

May 18-July 4, 1863: Confederate President Jefferson Davis saw Vicksburg, Mississippi, a fortress port and railroad hub along the Mississippi River, as "the nail head that holds the South's two halves together." That made it imperative for the Union to take what was known as the Gibraltar of the Confederacy.

In mid-May, Grant sent his forces to attack the city several times, but they were unable to penetrate the Confederates' defenses. That forced him to settle into a long siege, in which he bombarded Vicksburg with artillery and fire from Union gunboats, and forced Confederate defenders and the civilian population to endure hunger and illness. Many hid in man-made caves dug under the city.

In June, Grant tried one last assault, deploying miners to tunnel under the Confederate fortifications and plant explosives that carved out a 12-foot-deep crater. But the Union forces were unable to advance out of it and had to retreat. By July, Confederate Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton and his 29,000 men couldn't hold out any longer, and had to surrender to Grant.

The victory gave the Union control of the critical supply line of the entire Mississippi River. And the Confederacy was split.
READ MORE: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Help Win the Civil War
Gettysburg

July 1-3, 1863: Lee again invaded the Union in the summer of 1863 in hopes that he could beat the Union on its own soil, threaten Washington, D.C., and force Lincoln to agree to a peace treaty.

With Virginia devastated by the war, he also desperately needed supplies for his soldiers. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was pursued by Union forces led by Maj. Gen. George Meade, who caught up with them in Pennsylvania and confronted the Confederates at Gettysburg, in what was one of the most fateful battles in history.

Initially, the Confederates drove Union troops from fields west and north of the town, but they failed on the second day to break the Union line. On July 3, Lee attacked the center of the Union forces at Cemetery Ridge, south of Gettysburg. After two hours of shelling, Confederate Gen. George Pickett led two brigades in an assault on the Union position. Pickett's Charge, as it became known, turned into a disaster, with the Confederates suffering 60 percent casualties. Lee was forced to retreat and abandon his invasion.

The battle was a crushing defeat for the Confederacy, and losses were devastating on both sides. Union casualties numbered 23,000, while the Confederates lost some 28,000 men. The South's hopes for foreign recognition of the Confederacy were erased. Demoralized, Lee offered his resignation to President Jefferson Davis, but was refused.

The Battle of Gettysburg took on even more significance in November 1863, when President Lincoln traveled to the site and delivered the Gettysburg Address. In the famously short but powerful speech, Lincoln honored the sacrifice of the soldiers who died there and redefined the war as a struggle for the nation.
READ MORE: How the Battle of Gettysburg Turned the Tide of the Civil War
Atlanta

July 22, 1864: Near the end of the war, a trio of Union armies, led by Gen. William T. Sherman converged upon Atlanta, where they were met outside the city by a desperate Confederate counterattack that failed.

The Battle of Atlanta was the bloodiest part of Sherman's March through Georgia, costing the Union 3,700 casualties, while the Confederates lost 5,500 men. Sherman's forces continued their advance and finally surrounded the city, besieging it for the entire month of August.

Finally, on September 1, Confederate Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, a veteran of Antietam and Gettysburg who had lost his leg at the Battle of Chickamauga, gave up and abandoned the city, allowing Sherman's forces to enter.

The capture of Atlanta crippled the Confederate war effort. For Lincoln, who faced a difficult election in 1864 against one of his former generals, George B. McClellan, the victory provided a lift at the polls, helping him win and pursue the war to its conclusion.
WATCH: America: The Story of Us: Civil War on HISTORY Vault

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When Southern rebels bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April 1861, it was the start of a war between the Union and the secessionist Confederate States of America that would stretch on for four bloody years. The war took a brutal toll.

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Civil War Events Leading Up to Secession and War

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Civil War Events Leading Up to Secession and War

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The Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott Decision, John Brown's Raid at Harpers Ferry, and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

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The Compromise of 1850

In the wake of the Mexican War, tensions developed between the North and South over whether the western land gained by the U.S. should become free or slave territory. Things came to a head when California sought approval to enter the Union as a free state in 1849, which would have upset the balance struck by the Missouri Compromise several decades before. Senator Henry Clay, a Whig from Kentucky, proposed a package of legislation to resolve the disputes, but the Senate-after seven months of discussions-rejected his proposal.

Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, came up with an alternative proposal that admitted California, established Utah and New Mexico as territories that could decide for themselves whether to permit slavery, defined boundaries for the state of Texas, abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and obligated the entire country to cooperate in the capture and return of escaped slaves. But the deal only postponed the conflict.

"They didn't really compromise," says Michael Green, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of several books on the Civil War era, including Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War and Lincoln and the Election of 1860. "They just agreed to disagree."

The Fugitive Slave Act

An existing federal law, enacted by Congress in 1793, allowed local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners, and imposed penalties upon anyone who aided their flight. But the new version included in the Compromise of 1850 went much further, by compelling citizens to assist in capturing escapees, denying the captives the right to a jury trial, and increasing the penalty for anyone aiding their escape. It also put cases in the hands of federal commissioners who got $10 if a fugitive was returned, but only $5 if an alleged slave was determined to be a free Black.

Northern abolitionists rebelled against the law. After 50,000 anti-slavery protesters filled the streets of Boston to protest the arrest of a Black man named Anthony Burns in 1854, President Franklin Pierce sent federal troops to maintain order and provided a Navy ship to return Burns back to Virginia.

"Northerners who had questioned slavery said, 'We told you so,' and those who hadn't thought to themselves, 'This is going too far,'" says Green. "It's a radicalizing moment." As a result, Massachusetts and other free states began passing "personal liberty" laws, which made it difficult and costly for enslavers to prove their cases in court.

'Uncle Tom's Cabin' Is Published

In 1851, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was still grieving the loss of her 18-month-old son Samuel to cholera two years earlier, wrote to the publisher of a Washington, D.C.-based abolitionist newspaper, National Era, and offered to write a fictional serial about the cruelty of slavery. Stowe later explained that losing her child helped her to understand "what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is ripped away from her," according to Stowe biographer Katie Griffiths.

Stowe's story, published in 41 installments, boosted the paper's circulation, and a Boston publisher decided to release it as a two-volume novel. Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly sold 300,000 copies in its first year, and the vociferous public debate about the book exacerbated the differences between the North and South. Northerners were shocked by the brutal depiction of slavery, which Stowe had synthesized from published autobiographies of slaves and stories she had heard from friends and fugitive Blacks. In turn, "Southerners react noisily to it," Green explains. "They're saying, 'This is terrible. You're attacking us. You're all against us.'" When Stowe visited the White House in 1862, President Lincoln asked, "So this is the little lady who made this big war?"

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1854, Senator Douglas, the author of the Compromise of 1850, introduced another piece of legislation "to organize the Territory of Nebraska," an area that covered not just that present-day state but also Kansas, as well as Montana and the Dakotas, according to the U.S. Senate's history of the law. Douglas was promoting a transcontinental railroad that would pass through Chicago in his home state. But the envisioned northern route had to pass through the Nebraska territory, a place where slavery was prohibited by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Rivals, including slave owners, wanted a southern route.

To get what he wanted, Douglas offered a compromise, which would allow settlers in those territories to decide whether to legalize slavery. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, an opponent of slavery, attacked the proposal for creating "a dreary region of despotism." Nevertheless it was passed by Congress, with cataclysmic results.

"It re-opened that land to the expansion of slavery, and destroyed a long-established political compromise on the issue of slavery in the West," Phillips says. Pro-slavery and antislavery activists surged into the territories in an effort to sway the vote, and clashed violently in a conflict that became known as "Bleeding Kansas," which foreshadowed the Civil War.

The Pottawatomie Massacre

One of those who went to Kansas was a radical abolitionist and religious zealot named John Brown, who had worked as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and founded an organization that helped slaves escape to Canada. Brown moved to Kansas Territory, where in May 1856, he was angered by the destruction of a newspaper office and other property in Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery forces. Brown decided retaliation was in order.

At a spot near a crossing on Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin, Kansas, Brown, four of his sons and several others lured five proslavery men out of their houses with a promise that they would not be harmed, and then slashed and stabbed them with a saber and shot them in the head, according to a contemporary account of the attack. Brown's brutality was denounced by Southern newspapers and by some Northern ones as well, and it "aroused emotions and distrust on both sides," as an article from the Kansas Historical Society notes. The fighting in Kansas continued for another two years.

The Dred Scott Decision

Dred Scott, an enslaved man, was born in Virginia and later lived in Alabama and Missouri. In 1831, his original enslaver died, and he was purchased by a U.S. Army surgeon named John Emerson. Emerson took him to the free state of Illinois and also Wisconsin, a territory where slavery was illegal due to the Missouri Compromise. During that time, Scott married and he and his wife had four children. In 1843, Emerson died, and several years after that, Scott and his wife sued Emerson's widow in federal court for their freedom on the grounds that they had lived in free territory.

Scott, who was assisted financially by the family of his original owner, endured years of litigation until the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In an 1857 decision written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the court decided that Scott was not entitled to U.S. citizenship and the protection of law, no matter where he had lived. In the court's view, the Constitution's framers had not intended for Black people to be free, but instead viewed them as property, with "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The ruling made further political compromise too difficult.

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

Brown dreamed of carrying out an even bigger attack, one that would ignite a mass uprising of Southern enslaved people. On a night in October 1859, he and a band of 22 men launched a raid on Harpers Ferry, a town in what is now West Virginia, and captured some prominent local citizens and seized the federal arsenal there. His small force soon was counterattacked by local militia, forcing him to seek refuge. The following afternoon, U.S. Marines under the command of then-Col. Robert E. Lee arrived and stormed the arsenal, killing many of Brown's men and capturing him. Brown was tried and charged with treason, murder and slave insurrection, and sentenced to death. He was hanged in December 1859. While the attack failed to trigger the widespread revolt he envisioned, it drove the North and South even further apart.

"Northern abolitionists who preferred pacificism praised Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom and even helped to finance his attack," Phillips explains. "Southerners expected more acts of terrorism and prepared by bolstering their militias." In many respects, Brown's raid could be viewed as the first battle of the Civil War, he says.

The Election of 1860

Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer who had served a single term in Congress, emerged in the mid-1850s as an articulate and persuasive critic of slavery, and achieved national prominence with a series of debates against Senator Stephen Douglas in an unsuccessful campaign for Douglas's seat. When the Republican Party held a convention to nominate a presidential candidate, the chosen location of Chicago gave Lincoln a home-court advantage over more experienced politicians such as Senator William H. Seward of New York.

"When they set up the convention floor, they put Illinois in a spot where they could get to the other delegations that were less committed," Green says. "The New York delegation, which was supporting Seward, was put in a corner where they couldn't get out." That made it difficult for them to negotiate and persuade others to support their candidate. In the general election, Lincoln caught more lucky breaks. After the Democrats were unable to decide upon a candidate, southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, while northerners nominated Douglas. Breckenridge and Constitutional Party Candidate John Bell split the South, while Lincoln swept the northeastern and midwestern states except for Missouri (which went to Douglas), as well as Oregon and California to win the presidency despite getting just 40 percent of the vote. "For the first time, the Electoral College worked against the South," Green explains.

The Formation of the Confederacy

The election of the first U.S. president who was a vocal opponent of slavery came as a shock to Southerners. "Now, there is going to be someone in the White House who is not going to do what the South says it wants done, reflexively," Green explains. "Their feeling is, no matter what Lincoln says about protecting our rights, he's not going to do that. We don't trust him. He's been elected by people who are out to get us."

Less than six weeks after the election, the first secession convention met in Charleston South Carolina. About 60 percent of the 169 delegates were slave owners, and they voted unanimously to leave the Union. Local residents celebrated with bonfires, parades and the ringing of church bells. Five more states-Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana-soon followed. Representatives from those six states met in February 1861 to establish a unified government, which they called the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected as Confederate President. Texas joined in March.

After Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in April and Lincoln called for federal forces to retake it, four more states-Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee-left the union and joined the Confederacy as well.

Though the Confederacy's leaders didn't realize it, they actually were hastening the end of what they sought to protect. "Had they stayed, slavery as an institution almost certainly would have survived much longer," Green says.

Instead, a four-year, bloody war devastated much of the South, took the lives of more than 650,000 from both sides, and led to the emancipation of more than 3.9 million enslaved Black Americans, in addition to changing the nation in numerous other ways.

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9 Events That Led to the Civil War | HISTORY

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The Civil War was a conflict many years in the making.

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