-
The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with its main historic rival, the Democratic Party. -
It became law on May 30, 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, created two new territories, and allowed for popular sovereignty. It also produced a violent uprising known as “Bleeding Kansas,” as proslavery and antislavery activists flooded into the territories to sway the vote. -
Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. -
On November 10, 1860 the S.C. General Assembly called for a "Convention of the People of South Carolina" to consider secession. Delegates were to be elected on December 6. The secession convention convened in Columbia on December 17 and voted unanimously, 169-0, to declare secession from the United States. -
Once Virginia seceded, the Confederate government moved the capital to Richmond, the South's second largest city. The move served to solidify the state of Virginia's new Confederate identity and to sanctify the rebellion by associating it with the American Revolution. -
When Lincoln gave that address on March 4, 1861, seven southern states had already seceded from the nation, and civil war was imminent. Now, after four years of a terrible national crisis, Lincoln uses his Second Inaugural to gently, but clearly, call out slavery as the reason for the war. -
The Battle of Fort Sumter was the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina by the South Carolina militia. It ended with the surrender by the United States Army, beginning the American Civil War. -
On April 27, 1861, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia to give military authorities the necessary power to silence dissenters and rebels. Under this order, commanders could arrest and detain individuals who were deemed threatening to military operations. -
The First Battle of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Manassas, marked the first major land battle of the American Civil War. On July 21, 1861, Union and Confederate armies clashed near Manassas Junction, Virginia. -
On November 6, 1861, Jefferson Davis is elected president of the Confederate States of America. He ran without opposition, and the election simply confirmed the decision that had been made by the Confederate Congress earlier in the year. -
Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack, also called Battle of Hampton Roads, (March 9, 1862), in the American Civil War, naval engagement at Hampton Roads, Virginia, a harbor at the mouth of the James River, notable as history's first duel between ironclad warships and the beginning of a new era of naval warfare. -
The Battle of Shiloh was an early battle in the Western Theater of the American Civil War, fought April 6–7, 1862, in southwestern Tennessee. -
Originally called the Confederate Army of the Potomac, the confederate forces were renamed the Army of Northern Virginia when Robert E. Lee assumed command on June 1, 1862, in a battle to defend the city of Richmond from Union forces. -
The Battle of Antietam was a battle of the American Civil War fought between Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army and Union Gen. George B. McClellan's Army near Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek. Part of the Maryland Campaign, it was the first field army–level engagement in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War to take place on Union soil. It remains the bloodiest day in American history, with a combined tally of 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing. -
The Battle of Fredericksburg was fought December 11–15, 1862, in and around Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War. -
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." -
The Battle of Chancellorsville was a major battle of the American Civil War, and the principal engagement of the Chancellorsville campaign. It was fought from April 30 to May 6, 1863, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near the village of Chancellorsville. -
The New York Draft Riots occurred in July 1863, when the anger of working-class New Yorkers over a new federal draft law during the Civil War sparked five days of some of the bloodiest and most destructive rioting in U.S. history. Hundreds of people were killed, many more seriously injured, and African Americans were often the target of the rioters’ violence. -
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. -
On July 4, 1863, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton surrendered the city of Vicksburg and the Confederate garrison defending it to Major General Ulysses S. Grant. -
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a short speech at the close of ceremonies dedicating the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Honoring a request to offer a few remarks, Lincoln memorialized the Union dead and highlighted the redemptive power of their sacrifice. -
On August 28, 1864, Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman lays siege to Atlanta, Georgia, a critical Confederate hub, shelling civilians and cutting off supply lines. The Confederates retreated, destroying the city’s munitions as they went. On November 15 of that year, Sherman’s troops burned much of the city before continuing their march through the South. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign was one of the most decisive victories of the Civil War. -
Near the end of the American Civil War, incumbent President Abraham Lincoln of the National Union Party easily defeated the Democratic nominee, former General George B. McClellan, by a wide margin of 212–21 in the electoral college, with 55% of the popular vote. -
Union General Sherman's scorched-earth March to the Sea campaign begins. On November 15, 1864, Union General William T. Sherman begins his expedition across Georgia by torching the industrial section of Atlanta and pulling away from his supply lines. -
Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. -
On March 3, 1865, Congress passed “An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees” to provide food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to displaced Southerners, including newly freed African Americans. -
On the morning of Sunday April 2, 1865 Confederate lines near Petersburg broke after a nine month seige. The retreat of the army left the Confederate capital of Richmond, 25 miles to the north, defenseless. -
In Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrenders his 28,000 Confederate troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. -
On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was assassinated by well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. -
John Wilkes Booth is killed when Union soldiers track him down to a Virginia farm 12 days after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.