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29 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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The Monitor and the Merrimac
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Ironclad warship originally designed for use in shallow harbours and rivers to blockade the Confederate states in the American Civil War. The Merrimac was an ironclad warship, constructed by plating with iron a former United States frigate. The renamed warship Virginia left Norwalk to attack a blocking squadron of wooden ships at nearby Hampton Roads on March 8, 1862. It destroyed two of the ships and scattered the rest.
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“King Cotton” diplomacy
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was the idea that Britain and France required southern cotton to the point of extending diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy. As Senator Hammond of South Carolina exclaimed, "Cotton is King!" the Confederate States of America significantly overestimated the leverage that the cotton trade would give them. A large part of Britain's food imports came from the United States; a war with the U.S. would cause starvation in Britain and would risk American attacks on the entire British merchant fleet. Britain did not need the cotton in 1861 because it had a huge supply in its warehouses. During the war it bought cotton from the U.S. and developed new cotton sources in India and Egypt. The decision made spontaneously by Southerners in 1861 (not by their government) to hold cotton off the market was a huge blunder. Cotton that could have been shipped out and sold before the Union blockade became effective, instead never moved.
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Trent Affair
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Incident in the American Civil War involving freedom of the seas. On Nov. 8, 1861, the Union frigate San Jacinto stopped the neutral British steamer Trent to seize Confederate commissioners John Slidell and James Murray Mason, who were en route to England and France to seek support for the Confederacy. Protests in Britain denounced the action and called for war. On December 26, William Seward admitted the Union's error in not bringing the ship into a U.S. port for adjudication, and the two men were soon released.
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William C. Quantrill
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U.S. outlaw and Confederate guerrilla. After working as an itinerant schoolteacher, he moved to Kansas, where he failed at farming. By 1860 he was a horse thief and murderer. In the American Civil War he joined the Confederate army and later gathered a gang of guerrillas to raid and rob Union towns and farms. Quantrill's Raiders were made an official troop by the Confederates in 1862. In 1863 Quantrill and his group of about 450 men sacked the free-state town of Lawrence, Kan., killing 150 people. They later defeated a Union detachment, killing 90 soldiers. Quantrill was mortally wounded in a raid into Kentucky.
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Jayhawks
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Union sympathizers in Kansas
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Ex parte
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In the United States, the availability of ex parte orders or decrees from both federal and state courts is sharply limited by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which provide that a person shall not be deprived of any interest in liberty or property without due process of law. In practice this has been interpreted to require adequate notice of the request for judicial relief and an opportunity to be heard concerning the merits of such relief. A court order issued on the basis of an ex parte proceeding, therefore, will necessarily be temporary and interim in nature, and the person(s) affected by the order must be given an opportunity to contest the appropriateness of the order before it can be made permanent.
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Ex parte Merriman
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Federal Cases No. 9487 (1861), involved President Abraham Lincoln's exercise of extraordinary war powers, specifically his right to suspend habeas corpus. John Merryman, a Baltimore County secessionist, was imprisoned in Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor by military order on 25 May 1861. The commanding officer refused to comply with a writ of habeas corpus issued by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, on the grounds that he had been authorized by the president to suspend the writ. Taney wrote an opinion, widely denounced in the North, that the writ could be suspended constitutionally only by Congress, not by the president. Lincoln did not alter his policy.
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Ex parte Milligan
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[1866]- case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1866. By authorization of Congress, President Lincoln in 1863 suspended the writ of habeas corpus in cases where military officers held persons for offenses against the armed services. Army authorities had arrested Lambdin Milligan, a civilian who was involved in Copperhead, or pro-Confederate, activities in Indiana, and in 1864 he was tried by a military commission, convicted of fomenting rebellion, and condemned to death. The Supreme Court did not deal directly with the question of habeas corpus but with the limitation of martial law. It held that civilians might be tried by a military tribunal only where civil courts could not function because of invasion or disorder. It decided that even though the United States was at war, the federal courts of Indiana were operating, and they alone might try the case.
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General Robert E. Lee
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U.S. and Confederate military leader
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General George B. McClellan
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was a major general during the American Civil War. He organized the famous Army of the Potomac and served briefly (November 1861 to March 1862) as the general-in-chief of the Union Army. After his military service, he was an unsuccessful candidate for President of the United States in 1864 and was a Democratic Party politician, who served as the 24th Governor of New Jersey from 1878-1881.
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Mary Boykin Chestnut
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U.S. writer. The daughter of a prominent South Carolina politician, she attended private schools in her youth. In 1840 she married James Chestnut, Jr., who would play an important role in the secession movement and the Confederacy. After her husband became an officer in the Confederate army, she accompanied him on his military missions and recorded her views and observations in her journal. Her Diary from Dixie, a perceptive view of Southern life during the American Civil War, was published in 1905.
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"Upcountry and Backcountry" southeners
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the poorer people in the south where slavery was limited
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Alexander H. Stevens
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1812–83, American political leader, Confederate vice president (1861–65). He voted against secession in the Georgia convention of 1861, but accepted his state's decision and was a delegate to the convention in Montgomery, where the Confederacy was born. As vice president, Stephens consistently opposed the policies of Jefferson Davis, objecting notably to conscription and to suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. An early advocate of peace, he was one of three Confederate commissioners to the Hampton Roads Peace Conference. After the Civil War, Stephens was arrested and interned for several months in Fort Warren, Boston.
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Jefferson Davis
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an American statesman and advocate for States' Rights. He is most famous for serving as the only President of the Confederate States of America, leading the rebelling southern slave states (the Confederacy) to defeat because of a lack of soldiers and supplies toward the end of the American Civil War, 1861-65. he lacked the resources and experience to overcome his counterpart Abraham Lincoln, and was unable to defeat a more industrially developed Union. His insistence on independence even in the face of crushing defeat prolonged the war—Davis was an incredibly strong believer in the rights of the people to "alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established,"
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Morrill Tariff Act (1861):
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The Morrill Tariff of 1861 was a protective tariff bill passed by the U.S. Congress in early 1861. The act is informally named after its sponsor, Rep. Justin Morrill of Vermont, who designed the bill around recommendations by Pennsylvania economist Henry C. Carey. It was signed into law by Democratic president, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, where support for higher tariffs to protect the iron industry was strong. It replaced the Tariff of 1857. Some historians such as Beard and Beard (1928) argued there was a divergence in economic interests between an industrializing Northeast and a plantation South before the American Civil War. But Beard did not identify the tariff as a major issue that divided North and South. Two additional tariffs sponsored by Rep. Morrill, each one higher, were passed during Lincoln's administration to raise urgently needed revenue for war.The high rates of the Morrill tariff inaugurated a period of relatively continuous trade protection in the United States that lasted until the Underwood Tariff of 1913. As Frank Taussig observes, the schedule of the Morrill Tariff and its two successor bills were retained long after the end of the Civil War.
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Homestead Act (1862):
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The homestead act of 1862 permitted any citizen or prospective citizen to claim 160 acres of public land and to purchase it for a small fee after living on it for five years.
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Pacific Railway Act (1862)
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The union Pacific Railroad Company which was to build westward from Omaha, and the central Pacific, which was to build eastward from California. The two projects were to meet in the middle and complete the link.
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Morrill Land Grant Act (1862
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The Morrill Land Grant Act transferred substantial public acreage to the state governments, which were to sell the land and use the proceeds to finance public education. This act led to the creation of many new state colleges and universities, the so-called land-grant institutions.
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Confiscation Acts (1861, 1862)
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The Confiscation Act, which declared that all slaves used for “insurrectionary” purposes (support of the confederate military effort) would be considered freed.
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National Bank Acts (1863 & 1864)
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The National Bank Acts of 1863 and 1864 created a new national banking system. Existing or newly formed banks could join the system if they had enough capital and were willing to invest on-third of it in government securities. In return, they could issue U.S. treasury notes as currency. The new system eliminated much of the chaos and uncertainty in the nation’s currency and created a uniform system of national bank notes
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Greenbacks
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Greenbacks were paper currency. It was controversial, the printing of paper currency or ‘greenbacks’. The new currency was backed not by gold or silver, but simply by good faith and credit of the government (similar to today’s currency). The value of the greenbacks fluctuated according to the fortunes of the Northern Armies. In early 1864 with the war effort bogged down, a greenback dollar was only worth 39% of a gold dollar, at the close it was worth 67%. Because of the difficulty of making purchases with this uncertain currency, the gov. used greenbacks sparingly. The treasury issued $450 million worth of paper currency- small proportion of the coast of the war but produced significant inflation.
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Peace Democrats/ Copperheads
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opponents of the war in the north were certain factions in the Democratic Party. The Peace Democrats feared that the agricultural Northwest was losing influence to the industrial east and the Republican nationalism was eroding states’ rights.
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Clement L. Vallandigham
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The most prominent peace democrat, Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, was seized by military authorities and exiled to the Confederacy after he made a speech claiming that the purpose of the war was to free blacks and enslave the whites.
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Conscription Act (1863)
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): By March 1863, Congress was forced to pass a national draft law. Virtually all young adult males were eligible to be drafted; but a man could escape the service by hiring someone to go in his place or by paying the government a fee of $300. 46,000 men were ever actually conscripted, but the draft greatly increased voluntary enlistments. To a people accustomed to a remote and inactive national government, conscription was strange and ominous.
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A Rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight!:
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This term was used to describe the system of the newly instated draft within the Union. Men were able to avoid the draft by sending someone in their place or by paying the government a fee of 300 dollars. Hence the phrase it was a Rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.
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New York Draft Riots (1863):
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Opposition to the Conscription act was widespread, particularly among laborers, immigrants, and Democrats opposed to the war (peace democrats). Occasionally it erupted into violence. Demonstrators against the draft rioted in New York City for four days in July 1863, after the first names were selected for conscription. Over 100 people died. Irish workers were at the center of the violence. They were angry because black strikebreakers had been used against them in a recent longshoremen’s strike; and they blamed African Americans generally for the war, which they thought revolved around slaves who would be free and competing for jobs with them. The rioters lynched a number of African Americans, burned down homes and businesses, and even destroyed an orphanage for American Children. The arrival of federal troops was the thing that subdued them.
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Writ of Habeas Corpus
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The habeas Corpus helped to protect people who were arrested so they couldn’t be held unconstitutionally. When Lincoln took office, he suspended this rule (the right to a speedy trial) to better the whole of the Union.
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Emancipation proclamation
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On September 22, 1862 after the Union victory at the battle of Antietam, the president announced his intention to use his war powers to issue an executive order freeing all slaves in the Confederacy. And on January 1, 1863, he formally signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared forever free slaves in the areas of the Confederacy except those already under the Union control: Tennessee, western Virginia, and southern Louisiana. The proclamation did not apply to the border slave states, which had never seceded from the Union and therefore were not subject to the president’s war powers
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54th Massachusetts Regiment
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: A fighting unit in the Union army, the 54th Massachusetts infantry was a black regiment run by a white commander; Robert Gould Shaw, a member of an aristocratic Boston family. Shaw and more than his regiment died during a battle near Charleston, South Carolina in the summer of 1863.
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