Robert Smalls, a slave hired out to work aboard the Confederate steamship Planter, daringly commandeered the ship and delivered it to Union naval forces blockading Charleston harbor.
Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which extended the power of the Union military to free slaves in the Confederacy. The Union military granted freedom to blacks escaping to Union lines and enlisted them in ancillary positions.
President Lincoln announced the beginning of the insurrection and called for 75,000 ninety-day volunteers to put down the rebellion.
The Union Army captured the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia.
Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882) was a black abolitionist and clergyman. Garnet escaped from slavery with his family as a boy and settled in New York City. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1841 and soon became a well-known anti-slavery advocate. In 1843, he proposed militant slave uprising, putting him at odds with more centrist abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass. During the Civil War, Garnet helped recruit African Americans for the Union Army. He later supported black emigration to Africa, and in 1881 he was appointed...
Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919) was a female Civil War physician who received the Medal of Honor for her service. Walker received her medical degree from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. At the start of the Civil War, she offered to work as a surgeon for the Army. The Army initially refused her services, but she was able to practice after she agreed to work unpaid. Walker tended to Union wounded on site and at a hospital in Washington, DC. She earned the respect and admiration of her male colleagues and eventually received a paid contract...
Abraham Lincoln's views on slavery and its abolition were clearly expressed in speeches and action throughout his political career. This online exhibition, based on a document booklet of the same title produced in partnership with President Lincoln's Cottage at the Soldiers' Home in Washington DC (...
