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Congress was compelled to establish a policy to guide the expansion of slavery into the new western territory.
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A slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, led by Nat Turner. Rebel slaves killed from 55 to 65 people, at least 51 being white.
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The Wilmot Proviso was an unsuccessful 1846 proposal in the United States Congress to ban slavery in territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican–American War.
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Gold was found and people were rushing West in hope of a better life.
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The Kansas-Nebraska Act allows incoming settlers to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery.
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The Supreme Court decides that a slave, Dred Scott, has no rights a white man is bound to respect.
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Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860
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South Carolina votes to withdraw from the union.
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Confederate states of America founded as an independent republic. Slavery was allowed in these states.
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Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as president of the United States.
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Confederates fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
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Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers to put down the insurrection.
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Virginia's Robert E. Lee rejects Lincoln’s request to command the Union army.
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The Battle of First Manassas (Bull Run) in Virginia; 4,878 casualties.
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The Battles of Fort Henry and Donelson in Tennessee; 4,332 casualties. Episode Two
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The Battle of Shiloh at Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee; 23,700 casualties.
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Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation.The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."
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The Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania; 51,000 casualties. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is often described as the war's turning point.
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The Battles for Fort Fisher end in North Carolina; 1,841 casualties. The Second Battle of Fort Fisher was a successful assault by the Union Army, Navy and Marine Corps against Fort Fisher, south of Wilmington, North Carolina, near the end of the American Civil War.
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Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was established in 1865 by Congress to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War.
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Murderous attack on Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on the evening of April 14, 1865. Shot in the head by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln died the next morning.
