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Showing results 31 – 40 of 86
Glossary Term – Event
Fremont’s Proclamation
Major General John Charles Fremont issued an unauthorized order for the confiscation and emancipation of slaves; Lincoln later reversed it for fear of alienating “Southern Union friends.”
Glossary Term – Event
Grant named Union general in chief
After a string of disappointing generals, President Lincoln named Ulysses S. Grant general in chief of the US Army.
Glossary Term – Event
Call for Union volunteers
President Lincoln announced the beginning of the insurrection and called for 75,000 ninety-day volunteers to put down the rebellion.
Glossary Term – Event
Dorothea Dix named Superintendent of Female Nurses
Dorothea Dix was named Superintendent of Female Nurses.
Glossary Term – Event
Emancipation Proclamation
President Lincoln issued his official Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State . . . in rebellion against the United States . . . thenceforward and forever free.” Slaves in loyal areas (including the Border States) were not freed by the proclamation, as Lincoln believed that he only had the power to issue the proclamation “as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion” (though he would soon press for the emancipation of all slaves with the Thirteenth...
Glossary Term – Event
Monitor and Merrimack
The battle of the USS Monitor and CSS Merrimack—the first battle of ironclads—off Hampton Roads, Virginia, ended in a draw.
Glossary Term – Event
Gettysburg Address
At the dedication of the new national cemetary at Gettysburg, four months after the battle there, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address. The bloodiest battle of the Civil War, Gettysburg had taken 46,000 casualties between the Union and Confederacy. Lincoln honored the fallen dead and linked their sacrifice to the survival of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground,” Lincoln told the gathered...
Glossary Term – Organization
Freedmen’s Bureau
The Freedmen’s Bureau was a federal agency formed in 1865 to assist freed slaves during Reconstruction by providing education and economic adjustment.
Glossary Term – Organization
contrabands
During the Civil War, Southern slaves who escaped to Union lines came to be called “contrabands.” The term was first used by General Benjamin Butler, who refused to return escaped slaves to Confederate slaveholders because he deemed them “contraband of war.”