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12 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Harriet Tubman (1822–1922)
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Born into slavery in Maryland, Harriet Tubman escaped to the North and became an influential abolitionist, most notably for her work with the Underground Railroad. During her time before and during the American Civil War, Tubman helped dozens of slaves escape from the South. After the war, she became a noted women’s suffrage activist.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
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Born into a famous family of ministers, Harriet Beecher Stowe became an active abolitionist and author. She decided to write a novel that would address what she saw as slavery’s inhumanity, and her work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a searing (if slightly inaccurate) vision of the culture of the South. The book’s emotional appeal enraptured readers in the North and enraged Southerners who saw it as a libelous assault on their way of life. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was reproduced in plays and musicals throughout the Civil War era.
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Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861).
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Nicknamed the “Little Giant,” Douglas was an Illinois politician who rose to national prominence during his time in the U.S. Senate. In 1850, he was one of the primary architects of the Compromise that brought California into the Union and temporarily forestalled the outbreak of war. In 1854, he was the designer and advocate of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would allow voters in a given territory to decide on whether or not they would accept slavery. His Senate seat was challenged by Abraham Lincoln in 1856, and their series of debates across Illinois became a national referendum on competing visions of republicanism and sovereignty. In 1860 he was a candidate for the Presidency, nominated by the fractured Democratic Party. After losing the election to Abraham Lincoln, he crisscrossed the South prior to its secession, urging the states to remain in the Union.
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John Brown (1800–1859)
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Brown was a radical abolitionist who had failed as a businessman in a number of states and ventures but found his calling in revolutionary resistance to slavery. Brown believed that only militant action could bring about the eradication of slavery, and in 1856 he went to Kansas with the intent to enact his vision. He and his sons killed five suspected pro-slavery settlers at Potawatomie, Kansas, then fled to Virginia. In 1859, Brown and a handful of followers went to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, a small town south of Washington DC that was home to a federal arsenal. His intention was to raid the arsenal, distribute the weapons to local slaves, and then move south at the head of the uprising he was sure would follow. His plans faltered upon the arrival of federal troops, who wounded and captured him. Brown was put on trial for treason against a state. He was unrepentant upon his conviction and was executed later that year. His act enraged Southerners who viewed the attempt by a white man to lead a slave rebellion as the confirmation of their worst suspicions of the North; his execution infuriated Northern abolitionists who framed his death as an act of martyrdom.
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Jefferson Davis (1808–1889)
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At the outbreak of the Civil War, Davis was a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. When his state seceded in 1860, he left with it and was chosen by the nascent Confederacy as a compromise candidate for the presidency. As the sole leader of the Confederate State of America, Davis had to deal with a balky Congress and a national embrace of extreme states’ rights, which made national policies and imperatives difficult to achieve. At the end of the war, Davis briefly evaded capture before his arrest in 1865. Although imprisoned for a short time and indicted for treason, Davis never stood trial and was released. He died years after the war, considered by fellow Southerners as a representative of the nobility of the “Lost Cause.”
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Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885)
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Grant was a graduate of West Point who served in the Mexican War with some distinction but had a difficult time making a success of his peacetime life. At the beginning of the Civil War, he was working in his father’s harness shop in Moline, Illinois; he volunteered to serve, and given his military experience he was made the commander of a regiment. He rose to prominence through several well-publicized victories in the western theatre of the war and by 1862 had achieved a reputation as a dogged fighter immune to the prospect of immense casualties. In 1863 he captured the key Mississippi River town of Vicksburg, which convinced Abraham Lincoln to make him commander of the Union Army. For the last two years of the war, Grant pursued a war policy that forced the South to defend against invasion on all fronts without pause, taking advantage of the Union’s immense numerical and material superiority. He forced Robert E. Lee to surrender in April 1865, effectively ending the Civil War. In 1868, on the strength of his wartime popularity, Grant was elected President of the United States, though his two terms were marred by scandal and corruption.
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William T. Sherman (1820–1891)
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A talented but unruly Army officer and struggling businessman prior to the Civil War, William Sherman became U.S. Grant’s chief subordinate and primary enactor of the policy of “total” or “hard” war, which characterized the final years of the Civil War. Sherman’s policy was to attack the Southern population’s ability and willingness to support the Confederate cause, a policy most famously displayed in his “March to the Sea” in 1864. After capturing the city of Atlanta, Sherman ordered it evacuated and burnt. He then marched his army across the state of Georgia to the port of Savannah, wreaking destruction along the way. After taking Savannah, Sherman turned north into South Carolina and continued the devastation. His actions and policies earned him enmity from the South and the label by some historians of the first “modern general.”
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Robert E. Lee.
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Born into a wealthy and influential Virginia family headed by a former Revolutionary War hero, Robert E. Lee had the pedigree of an American military legend. He had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy with a spotless record, served with distinction in the Mexican War and as commandant of West Point, and famously arrested John Brown in 1859, halting the radical abolitionist’s attempt to lead a slave rebellion. When his home state of Virginia seceded from the Union, Lee declined his government’s offer of command of the Union Army, resigned his commission, and joined the new Confederate military. Within a year he was field commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Throughout the war, he served as the backbone of the Southern army, until he was compelled to surrender in 1865.
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Clara Barton
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When the Civil War began, Barton was involved in nursing in her home state of Massachusetts. She began tending to wounded soldiers at the Battle of Bull Run, and most of her work came directly on the battlefield. After the war, at the urging of the International Red Cross, she formed the American chapter of that organization in 1869. For the rest of her life she was an outspoken advocate for prison reform, hospitals, and women’s issues.
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Andrew Johnson
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Johnson was born to a poor family in Tennessee and taught himself to read and write. After a brief apprenticeship as a tailor, he entered politics and swiftly moved up in Tennessee electoral office. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was a U.S. Senator and committed Unionist, and he refused to go along with secession in 1860. As the war wound down, he was nominated by the Republican Party for the Vice Presidency with Abraham Lincoln, even though he was a Democrat. When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Johnson became president and tried to carry out Lincoln’s plan for reconstruction. Though sympathetic to poor whites in the South, Johnson had little concern for the new freedmen of the former Confederacy, and his version of Presidential Reconstruction was swiftly opposed by the Radical wing of the Republican Party. Radicals attempted to marginalize Johnson by passing the Tenure of Office Act, which forbade the president from firing any member of his cabinet without congressional approval. Johnson violated the new law by firing his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton; the Congress responded by passing articles of impeachment. The Senate fell one vote short of the required two-thirds’ majority necessary for conviction, but Johnson’s political fate was sealed. He served out the remainder of his term rendered powerless and ineffective.
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Thaddeus Stevens.
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A U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, Stevens was one of the leaders of the Radical wing of the Republican Party and became, after the death of President Lincoln, one of the main advocates for freedmen in the South during the Reconstruction period. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Stevens promoted initiatives that would, he believed, help African Americans gain social and political equality in the South. He supported the passage of the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed equal treatment under the law for blacks and supported military occupation of the Southern states in order to guarantee acceptance of the new regime.
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Charles Sumner
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As a Senator from Massachusetts, Sumner became the primary voice for the abolitionist North. One of his speeches in 1856 brought on an attack by a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, who beat Sumner viciously with his cane. Sumner returned to the Senate three years later, still adamantly opposed to slavery. During Reconstruction, Sumner became one of the most influential members of the Radical Republicans. He was a strong supporter of African American rights in the postwar era and was co-author of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
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