John Wilkes Booth: American actor, assassin of United States President Abraham Lincoln.

Dawes Act: National legislation that converted communally owned Native American reservation lands into individually owned parcels. Excess acreage was sold to white settlers. Enactment contributed to the further decline of tribal populations, traditions, and well:being.

Sanford Vs. Scoot,

Dred Scott Decision : Dred Scott Case, landmark case of the 1850s in which the Supreme Court of the United States declared that African Americans were not U.S. citizens. The Court also determined that the portion of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that banned slavery in U.S. territories north and west of the state of Missouri was unconstitutional. Officially titled Scott v. Sandford, the decision intensified ongoing debates over slavery that further polarized the American North and South and eventually gave rise to the American Civil War in 1861.

Ulysses S. Grant : 18th president of the United States (1869-1877). Grant was a puzzling figure in American public life. He was a failure in his early ventures into both business and military life. In four years of commanding Union forces he climbed to the highest rank in the U.S. Army and directed the strategy that successfully concluded the Civil War in 1865. His two terms as president of the United States are considered by many historians to be the most corrupt in the country's history. Yet from accounts of Grant's contemporaries, as well as from his own memoirs, there emerges a personality of strong character and considerable dignity.

Robert E. Lee: brilliant Confederate general, whose military genius was probably the greatest single factor in keeping the Confederacy alive through the four years of the American Civil War.

Andrew Johnson: The vice president who had took over Abarham Lincoln, the only president to be impeached

Slavery: heir labor or services are obtained through force; their physical beings are regarded as the property of another person, their owner; and they are entirely subject to their owner's will. Since earliest times slaves have been legally defined as things; therefore, they could, among other possibilities, be bought, sold, traded, given as a gift, or pledged for a debt by their owner, usually without any recourse to personal or legal objection or restraint.

Alamo: A mission in San Antonio. On February 23, 1836, a Mexican force of more than 2000 men commanded by Antonio López de Santa Anna, general and dictator of Mexico, reached the outskirts of San Antonio, which had been captured by Texan insurgents the previous December.

Missouri Compromise: Legislative measures enacted by the United States Congress in 1820 that regulated the extension of slavery in the United States for three decades. When slaveholding Missourians applied for statehood in 1818, the long-standing balance of free and slave states (11 each) was jeopardized. A northern-sponsored amendment was then attached to the bill (1819) authorizing statehood; it prohibited the entry of slaves into Missouri and provided for the gradual emancipation of those already there. The proslavery faction was unable to prevent the bill's passage by the House of Representatives, where free states held a majority, but southern strength in the Senate defeated the bill.

Kansas-Nebraska Act: U.S. law authorized the creation of Kansas and Nebraska, west of Missouri and Iowa and divided by the 40th parallel. It repealed the Missouri Compromise in 1820 that had prohibited slavery in the territories north of 36° 30', and stipulated that the inhabitants of the territories should decide for themselves the legality of slaveholding. The passage of the act caused a realignment of the major U.S. political parties and greatly increased tension between North and South in the years before the American Civil War.

Confederate States Of America: name adopted by the federation of 11 slaveholding Southern states of the United States that seceded from the Union and were arrayed against the national government during the American Civil War. Immediately after confirmation of the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, the legislature of South Carolina convened. In a unanimous vote on December 20, 1860, the state seceded from the Union. During the next two months ordinances of secession were adopted by the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. President James Buchanan, in the last days of his administration, declared that the federal government would not forcibly prevent the secessions. In February 1861, the seceding states sent representatives to a convention in Montgomery, Alabama. The convention, presided over by Howell Cobb of Georgia, adopted a provisional constitution and chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as provisional president and Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia as provisional vice president. The convention, on March 11, 1861, unanimously ratified a permanent constitution. The constitution, which closely resembled the federal Constitution, prohibited the African slave trade but allowed interstate commerce in slaves.

William T. Sherman: United States general in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Sherman is remembered for his campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas in which the Northern troops devastated the Southern landscape and resources. Was ordered to fight against Atlanta Georgia, he lost the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, and he did not capture Atlanta until almost three months later, on September 1. After joining he worked under U. Grant.

Battle Of Vicksburg: major siege of the American Civil War, consisting of military campaigns in 1862 and 1863 that ended with the capture of the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, by Union troops on July 4, 1863.

Battle Antietam: Antietam, Battle of, important battle of the American Civil War. About 50,000 Confederate troops led by General Robert E. Lee attempted an invasion of the North. They were intercepted on September 17, 1862, at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland, by a Union army of 70,000 men under the command of General George Brinton McClellan. In the ensuing action, the Union army suffered about 12,000 casualties, including 2,108 killed. Lee lost some 25 percent of his force; at least 2,700 Confederate soldiers were killed, and about 10,000 were wounded or missing. Lee's army retreated across the Potomac River the next day, making the outcome technically a Union victory and providing the positive news that President Abraham Lincoln felt was a prerequisite to the issuance of a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The area was designated a national battlefield site in 1890.

Amnesty: Amnesty, in international law, act of effacing and forgetting past offenses granted by the government to persons who have been guilty of neglect or crime.

Scalawags: American historical term denoting Southerners who supported the federal program of Reconstruction, the period of rebuilding after the American Civil War (1861-1865). After the Civil War ended, the federal government ordered Southern states that had seceded from the Union to set up new state governments. These governments were dominated by Republicans, both black and white. Southerners who did not support these Republican governments called the white Southerners involved scalawags and the white Northerners involved carpetbaggers. The term scalawag was originally used to describe worthless livestock.

Civil Rights: Civil Right’s is to grant freedom & applied for all citizens to have equal protection under law and equal opportunity to exercise the privileges of citizenship. No matter what you participate in national life, regardless of race, religion, sex, or other characteristics unrelated to the worth of the individual.

Fourteenth Amendment: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Ku Klux Klan: Ku Klux Klan is the secret terrorist organization that originated in the southern states during the period of Reconstruction following the American Civil War and was reactivated on a wider geographic basis in the 20th century. The original Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, during the winter of 1865 to 1866, by six former Confederate army officers who gave their society a name adapted from the Greek word kuklos (“circle”). Although the Ku Klux Klan began as a prankish social organization, its activities soon were directed against the Republican Reconstruction governments and their leaders, both black and white, which came into power in the southern states in 1867.

Plessy V. Ferguson: Landmark case of 1896 in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the legality of racial segregation. At the time of the ruling, segregation between blacks and whites already existed in most schools, restaurants, and other public facilities in the American South. In the Plessy decision, the Supreme Court ruled that such segregation did not violate the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. This amendment, ratified in 1868, provides equal protection of the law to all U.S. citizens, regardless of race. The court ruled in Plessy that racial segregation was legal as long as the separate facilities for blacks and whites were “equal.” This “separate but equal” doctrine—as it came to be known—was only partially implemented after the decision. Railroad cars, schools, and other public facilities in the South were made separate, but they were rarely made equal.

Denmark Vesey: Freedman, who planned a slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina, that was meant to kill the entire white population and free the blacks. Born probably on Saint Thomas in the Danish (now United States) Virgin Islands, he was brought to Charleston in 1783. Having won $1500 in a street lottery in 1800, he bought his freedom and thereafter worked as a carpenter. He resented, however, the continued enslavement of his children (born of a slave mother), and inspired by the Haitian slave revolt (1791), with which he was familiar, he began in 1821 to plot and organize an extensive uprising among blacks in and around the city.

Thaddeus Stevens: American politician, leading member of the United States House of Representatives during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction period.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: American writer and abolitionist, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin which was written in 1852, a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature. Her first books were The Mayflower, Sketches of Scenes, and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims, appeared in 1843. While living in Brunswick, Maine, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was serialized in 1851 and 1852 in an abolitionist paper, the National Era, and issued as a book in 1852.

Booker T. Washington : American educator, who urged blacks to attempt to convince them to study and be educated

Jefferson Davis : First and only president of the Confederate States of America (1861:1865).

Abraham Lincoln: 16th president of the United States (1861-1865) and one of the great leaders in American history. A humane, far-sighted statesman in his lifetime, he became a legend and a folk hero after his death.

Stephen Douglas: Douglas was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served from 1843 until 1847. He became an outstanding spokesman for a policy of national expansion.

Frederick Douglass: Fredrick Douglass is the most prominent African American orator, journalist, and antislavery leader of the 19th century. Douglass, an escaped slave, campaigned for the end of slavery and published three versions of his autobiography. In these works he described his experiences as a slave in the South and as a fugitive in the North. He also depicted life as a free black before the American Civil War (1861-1865) and his rise to national prominence during and after the war. In later life he continued to work for full civil rights for blacks and held several government positions.

Fugitive Slave Laws:  Acts passed by the United States Congress in 1793 and 1850, intended to facilitate the recapture and extradition of runaway slaves and to commit the federal government to the legitimacy of holding property in slaves. Both laws ultimately provoked dissatisfaction and rancor throughout the country. Northerners questioned the laws' infringements on civil liberty and deplored the national character they lent to the South's institution. Southerners complained that the laws were circumvented both because of legal deficiencies (especially the law of 1793) and growing popular hostility to enforcement. The controversy grew with the Republic itself.

Wilmot Proviso: A Bill adopted in 1846 by the U.S. House of Representatives, asked by David Wilmot, a representative from Pennsylvania. Asked for 2 million dollars to indemnify from Mexico Slavery.

Mason Dixon Line: The term Mason:Dixon Line was popularly used to designate the line that divided the so:called free states from the slave states during the debates in Congress over the Missouri Compromise in 1820. This also ment the line of the Ohio River.

54th Massachusetts: When the Civil War began, Massachusetts was the first state to send troops to support the federal government, and when secessionists in Maryland killed several of these men in riots, Massachusetts soldiers became the first to die for the Union. Massachusetts also was the first Northern state to establish a black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. More than 146,000 Massachusetts men served in the Union Army during