Key Terms
- Army of the Potomac
- the Union fighting force operating outside Washington, DC
- Army of the West
- the Union fighting force operating in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Mississippi River Valley
- Confederacy
- the new nation formed by the seceding southern states, also known as the Confederate States of America (CSA)
- contrabands
- enslaved people who escaped to the Union army’s lines
- Copperheads
- Democrats who opposed Lincoln in the 1864 election
- Crittenden Compromise
- a compromise, suggested by Kentucky senator John Crittenden, that would restore the 36°30′ line from the Missouri Compromise and extend it to the Pacific Ocean, allowing slavery to expand into the southwestern territories
- Emancipation Proclamation
- signed on January 1, 1863, the document with which President Lincoln transformed the Civil War into a struggle to end slavery
- Fort Sumter
- a fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, where the Union garrison came under siege by Confederate forces in an attack on April 12, 1861, beginning the Civil War
- general in chief
- the commander of army land forces
- Gettysburg Address
- a speech by Abraham Lincoln dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863
- greenbacks
- paper money the United States began to issue during the Civil War
- habeas corpus
- the right of those arrested to be brought before a judge or court to determine whether there is cause to hold the prisoner
- Sherman’s March to the Sea
- the scorched-earth campaign employed in Georgia by Union general William Tecumseh Sherman
- total war
- a state of war in which the government makes no distinction between military and civilian targets, and mobilizes all resources, extending its reach into all areas of citizens’ lives