American Civil War

By David Head

Students, history and Civil War buffs can have answers lickety split at their fingertips. This timeline in 6 laminated pages includes the critical people and events that played a part in this heroic and tragic turning point that fortified American pride.

Suggested uses:
• Students - Review before relevant history tests, support class lessons and textbook, impress your teachers & professors
• Teachers/Professors - fact bank to build tests & quizzes, lesson plan support, reference for documentary film viewing, supplement to the textbook
• Reenactors - Indestructible reference during muddy Civil War reenactments reenactments

• Language: English
• Publisher: BarCharts, Inc.
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781423237464

David Head

DAVID HEAD is a lecturer of history at the University of Central Florida and the author of Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic (Georgia).

Book preview

Table of Contents

The Crisis of the Union, 1848–1856

The Specter of Secession, 1857–1860

The War Begins, 1861

The Fighting Deepens, 1862

The Turning Point, 1863

The Union’s Hard Road to Victory, 1864

The War at Sea & on the Rivers, 1861–1865

The War on the Home Front, 1861–1865

The Union Preserved, 1865

Presidential Reconstruction, 1863–1866

Radical Reconstruction, 1867–1877

Crisis of the Union, 1848–1856

star 1848 star

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends the Mexican- American War.

The United States gains vast lands in the west, including portions of the present-day states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado.

Each year during the war (1846–1848), Congressman David Wilmot (D-PA) offers the Wilmot Proviso to prohibit slavery in any lands won from Mexico.

Although never adopted, whether slavery will be allowed in the new territories emerges as a point of fierce debate.

The California Gold Rush begins, bringing thousands of settlers west.

Zachary Taylor, a Mexican War general and Whig from Louisiana, is elected president, defeating Democrat Lewis Cass and Free-Soil Party candidate Martin Van Buren, the former president.

The Free-Soil Party is dedicated to keeping slavery out of the western territories.

Taylor, a slave owner, attempts to stay neutral on slavery, for fear of offending the pro- and antislavery factions of his party.

Cass develops the doctrine of popular sovereignty in which the status of slavery in the new territories would be left up to the vote of the territories’ residents.

star 1850 star

The Compromise of 1850 attempts to resolve the question of slavery’s status in the territories. Congress agrees to:

Admit California, its population swelled by gold miners, to the Union as a free state.

Prohibit the slave trade (but not slavery) in the District of Columbia.

Enact a strong fugitive slave law.

Organize the Utah and New Mexico territories with popular sovereignty to decide the future of slavery.

Pay Texas $10 million to settle its debts and resolve its border dispute with New Mexico.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the Compromiseof 1850, empowers federal marshals to catch runaway slaves and return them to their former owners.

Many northerners, though previously indifferent to slavery, turn against the measure’s use of federal agents and operation in northern cities.

To avoid arrest, thousands of northern free blacks flee to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

star 1851 star

Violence breaks out in Christiana, PA, as a slave owner, aided by deputy marshals, attempts to reclaim escaped slaves given sanctuary by a community