TO THE MIDTERM EXAM

Cyrus McCormick
Age of Reform
Lucretia Mott
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Seneca Falls Convention
Cassius Clay
James Gordon Bennett
George Fitzhugh
Cannibals All! Or Slaves without Masters
Nat Turner
Underground Railroad
Ostend Manifesto
Pierre Soule
Salmon P. Chase
 

Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States
Wilson Shannon
Wakarusa War
Dr. John Emerson
“Committee of Thirty-Three”
“Committee of Thirteen”
John Letcher
General David Twiggs
Isham Harris
John Merryman
Ex parte Merryman
Francis Pierpoint
State of Kanawha
Commodore Andrew Foote

Special Orders No. 191
New York Draft Riots
Simon Cameron
Major General Montgomery Meigs
Andersonville Prison
General Josiah Gorgas
General Lucius Northrop
Christopher Memminger
James Mason
William W. Holden
Order of the Heroes of America
Prize Cases
Ball’s Bluff
Morrill Land-Grant Act
Clement Vallandigham
Lamdin Milligan
Ex parte Milligan
Salmon Chase
Jay Cooke
Legal Tender Act
Trent Affair
Captain Charles Wilkes
James Murray Mason
John Slidell
Laird Rams
Charles Francis Adams
Yellow Tavern
Stephen Mallory
CSS Virginia
USS Monitor
Lieutenant John L. Worden
Flag Officer Samuel F. Du Pont
United States Sanitary Commission
Nathaniel P. Banks
Thomas J. Durant
James Lusk Alcorn
Enforcement Acts
Liberal Republicans
Slaughterhouse Cases
United Stats v. Cruikshank
United States v. Reese
Specie Resumption Act
David Davis
Adelbert Ames

General Robert E. Lee of Virginia,
the Confederacy's greatest soldier.

TO THE MIDTERM EXAM

1. What were the more significant sentimental and institutional bonds that held the Union together until the Civil War? What major economic and social differences caused the North and South to pull in different directions in the antebellum period?

2. Describe why slavery would be an unhappy experience for African Americans. And why were white Southerners - even those who did not own slaves - so determined to protect slavery and promote its growth?

3. If most Northerners were racists who cared little about the welfare of African-Americans, why did they grow increasingly determined to oppose the expansion of slavery into the Western territories in the 1840s and 1850s?

4. What was the Wilmot Proviso? Why did it so infuriate white Southerners? And what compromise temporarily calmed the tensions inspired by the Wilmot Proviso (be sure to give both that compromise's name and its terms)?

5. Why did Northerners react with such vehemence against the Kansas-Nebraska Act? What impact did the act have on national politics? What were the causes of "Bleeding Kansas"?

6. What did John Brown hope to achieve when he seized the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859? What effect did Brown's raid, trial, and execution have on North/South relations?

7. Why did seven Southern states secede from the Union between December 20, 1860, and February 1, 1861? What rationale did white Southerners employ to justify secession? Do you accept their arguments and do you feel the South's situation as of November 6, 1860, justified secession?

8. Why did President James Buchanan avoid the use of force in his efforts to avoid secession, and why did Abraham Lincoln follow essentially the same course until April 15, 1861? Yet why did Lincoln advocate rejection of the Crittenden Compromise? How did the two Presidents view secession? Did they consider it a valid expression of states' rights?

9. Why did the Civil War break out in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, in April 1861? What did Fort Sumter symbolize to the North and to the South? Why did fighting break out when it did?

TO THE FINAL EXAM
 

1. How did Abraham Lincoln and other Unionists keep the Southern states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri from joining the Confederacy?

2. What major material advantages did the North enjoy at the Civil War's start? Did the South possess any resources to offset the North's advantages? What were they?

3. How did the Union and Confederacy mobilize their respective manpower resources to fight the Civil War? Did one section do better than the other? How so? And why did Confederate units have a higher proportion of veterans in 1864 and 1865 than Union land forces?

4. Address the problem of military leadership in the Civil War. Why did the generals have such a hard time organizing, supplying, training, and maneuvering the large citizen armies entrusted to their care? Why did Civil War generals get so many men killed in battle?

5. Address the problem of political leadership in the Civil War. Who was a better war leader, Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? Explain why.

6. How did Ulysses S. Grant contribute to the North's ultimate victory in the Civil War from 1862 to 1865? What made him a great general?

7. How did William Tecumseh Sherman contribute to the North's ultimate victory in the Civil War? How did he change the American approach to war?

8. Why did Robert E. Lee's second invasion of the North fail? What errors did Lee commit at the Battle of Gettysburg?

9. Why did Abraham Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and what impact did the document have on the course of the Civil War?

10. What basic assumptions undergirded Lincoln's Reconstruction policies? What were the terms of his Reconstruction plan as laid down on December 8, 1863?

11. What plan of Reconstruction did Andrew Johnson offer the South in the spring and summer of 1865? Why did so many Northerners find his policies objectionable? Why were Johnson and Congress unable to compromise over Reconstruction?

12. What were the terms of Radical Reconstruction as laid down in the First Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867? Was the plan just or simply an expression of Yankee vengeance -- or did it fall somewhere in between.

13. Why did Reconstruction fail to protect freedmen from white Southerners determined to deny blacks their civil rights? Who was most to blame for the failure of Reconstruction -- the white South, the white North, or blacks themselves?