Bleeding Kansas
The skirmishes between pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas were a brutal foreshadowing of the Civil War. After passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, free-soil and pro-slavery settlers moved into the new state in the anticipation of struggle over the state's position on slavery. The first settlers into the territory came from neighboring Missouri, and many brought their slaves with them. Virtual civil war erupted when over 4,000 armed Missourians, whose state was already bordered by two free states and thus easy to escape from, battled anti-slavery settlers. John Brown launched his famous raids against the slave-holders. By the winter of 1855-1856 the territory had two governments, and in the spring, conflicts again flared. President Franklin Pierce was required to send troops to restore order in 1856, and a truce was imposed. Kansas eventually became a free state and was admitted to the Union in 1861.

Civil Rights
Whereas the rights of African-Americans should have been secured with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Constitutional Amendments (1865-1868), it was actually a full century before a complete Civil Rights Act (1965) entered the books. It guaranteed voting rights, which had been incomplete in the face of local registration requirements, and prohibited various sorts of discrimination and segregation. This act had implications not only for blacks, but for all minorities; it spoke against gender-based discrimination also.

compromise
The resolution of differences or conflict by negotiation and consent involving mutual concessions. The Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Compromise of 1850 reflected the divisive approaches taken to slavery by northern and southern politicians. The compromises were reached by drawing the northern limit on slavery at the thirty-sixth parallel and by selecting the notion of popular sovereignty, which allowed the inhabitants of new states to decide the issue of slavery for themselves.

Compromise of 1850
Proposed by the "Great Pacificator" Henry Clay, the eight resolutions of this compromise admitted California as a free state, specified that slavery would continue (though slave trade would not) in the District of Columbia, strengthened provisions for the capture of fugitive slaves, and kept the Federal government from interfering in interstate slave trade. The compromises were passed in a series of bills after the sudden death of President Taylor, though not in the spirit of compromise. One historian later called the effort the "Armistice of 1850."

Copperhead
With the beginning of the war, the Democratic party split into two factions: the Peace Democrats and the War Democrats. The former were opposed to the Republican (Lincoln's party) scheme to crush the South, and they gained power in 1861 and 1862, when northern hopes for quick victory were dim. The War Democrats, some of them having become Republicans, and many of them having accused Peace Democrats of virtual treason, won out in the end. Peace Democrats, or Copperheads as they were known for the copper pennies they sometimes wore as badges, were likened in the press to a venomous snake. They were mostly midwestern Democrats opposed to emancipation and sympathetic to the South. They sought to convince northerners that the war should be ended by a negotiated settlement.

Conscription Act
In the spring of 1862, the term of enlistment of many Confederate volunteers was up. The South's army was shrinking. Jefferson Davis forced the passage of two new laws: one extended the term of enlistment for current soldiers until the war's end, and other called into service all able-bodied white men of ages eighteen to thirty-five. It was the country's first draft, and it was extremely unpopular. The Union drafted men aged twenty to forty-five in the summer of 1863. The term of enlistment for Union draftees was three years. On both sides, many simply failed to show up for enlistment.

corruption
The practice of unlawful or improper use of influence, power, and other means. Political offices have been susceptible to corruption throughout history. Grant's presidency was marred by the corruption of some of his officers. Ely Parker's Commission on Indian Affairs was also corrupted by ill-meaning religious figures and profiteers. Parker had been the first Native American to hold the position.

Democratic Party
The National Democratic party was torn apart shortly after the start of the war when it first became clear that the commitment might last longer than expected. War Democrats, who wished to restore the Union by military victory, then faced off against Peace Democrats, who were willing to accept an independent Confederacy.

dignity
Dignity might be the word that accounts for the Civil War's fury and duration. Northerners stood up for the moral dignity of emancipation and preservation of the Union. Southerners defended the dignity of their deep traditions and the sovereignty of their way of life. Blacks fought for the simple yet moving dignity of human freedom.

Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott was the slave of a surgeon who had taken him to Illinois, a free state. When his owner died in 1846 Scott sued for his freedom and won it temporarily, until the Missouri state supreme court overruled it in 1852. He appealed various times while with a new owner, and his case grew. The U.S. Supreme Court heard the case in 1856-7. The rather complex decision, which touched on states' rights, the status of blacks as a race, federal and constitutional authority, and the issue of slavery in the territories, determined that as an "inferior race," blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Scott's case, the Court determined, should not have been heard in the first place. The decision was not unanimous, and Republicans of the time balked. The matter greatly divided the nation and helped lead to the rise of the Republican Party.

free black
As many as 250,000 free blacks lived in the South next to their enslaved brethren, but their freedom was severely constrained. They had no rights under the law, and society at large offered them little that might suggest equality. In the North, all blacks were free, but they, too, had few legal rights. Competition with immigrants in the cities, in particular with some Irish, sometimes erupted into fierce street riots. Free blacks should not be confused with freedmen, who were emancipated ex-slaves.

hardtack
"Army bread," or hardtack, was an unleavened cracker that became legendary among soldiers, and the butt of much ridicule and hostility. Some Union troops quipped that their hardtack dated to the Mexican War and was none the less edible for that!

Kansas-Nebraska Act
Written by Stephen Douglas in 1854, the Kansas Nebraska Act sought to resolve the status of the Louisiana Purchase by dividing it in two: Kansas and Nebraska. Following the entry of California and Oregon into the Union as free states, the act undid the Compromise of 1850, which explicitly banned slavery north of 36 30', and left the matter open to popular sovereignty--as the decision of the new states' citizens. After passage of the bill, Horace Greeley noted that it had created more abolitionists in the North than abolitionists themselves had. Attacks by "border ruffians" from neighboring Missouri on anti-slavery settlers sparked the state's virtual civil war remembered as "Bleeding Kansas." John Brown's first bloody anti-slavery raids were conducted in that state, the most famous being at Pottawatomie Creek.

Know-Nothing Party
The dramatic rise in immigration to the United States between 1846 and 1855 created a ground swell of resistance and anti-foreign sentiment. Three million immigrants had arrived during that decade, equal to fifteen percent of the 1845 population. One political party called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner claimed one million members, mostly in the North, and especially in New York. Asked about their party, members would respond: "I know nothing." The name stuck.

Medal of Honor
The country's highest award for bravery, the Medal of Honor, was first bestowed upon an officer in 1863. No similar medal was presented in the Confederacy, for President Davis considered every soldier deserving of such an award. Twenty-three blacks were awarded the medal .

Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise of 1820, in which the new state of Missouri was admitted as a slave state, actually took from 1819 to 1821 to produce. In 1819 there were twenty-two states divided evenly between slave and free states. Louisiana had been an organized territory since 1804, and the state of Louisiana was admitted in 1812. Southerners feared that a free Missouri would give anti-slavery Senators the chance to pass legislation hostile to the South. Missouri was admitted as a slave state while slavery was prohibited from that time on in the Louisiana Territory north of 36 30'. (Maine was admitted as a free state in 1821.) The compromise appeased many northerners and southerners until the Mexican War made additional land available, thus stirring pro-slavery hopes of expansion. One popular New England poem quipped on pro- slavery interests in a pro-slave California: "They jest want this Calliforny/So's to lug new slave-states in/To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye,/And to plunder ye like sin."

Negro
The term used to refer to blacks of African origin. Related to the Spanish word for black, Negro, and the term used to describe African races, Negroid, Negro was in common use into the 1960s. The Black power and Black pride movements popularized the preferred term Afro-American during the late 1960s (Malcolm X had objected to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s use of the term Negro, proposing instead Afro- American). "African-American" emerged later, as did Native-American, Asian-American, etc.

plantation
Large plantations were relatively few in number across the South. A farm worked by at least twenty or more slaves was defined as a plantation. While sugar, tobacco, rice, and hemp were common plantation crops, it was cotton that reigned. In fact, the "cotton kingdom" had grown so steadily, to supply primarily the British demand for the crop, that the link between cotton and slavery became unshakable. The quality of life for slaves on plantations varied. In some cases it was marginally better than for others. While slaves were defined as mere property, their labor was important enough that most owners saw the value in good treatment. Said one former slave: "[He] fed us reg'lar on good, 'stantial food, just like you'd tend to you hoss, if you had a real good one."

planter
After the invention of the cotton gin, southern planters again operated a profitable agriculture and accounted for a significant portion of the United States' exports. Though they were only twelve percent of the slave-holding population, half of the South's labor force lived on these plantations. (Fifty-five percent of slaves raised cotton; more than half of the slave population was owned by planters presiding over twenty or more slaves.) Planters, in fact, could only increase their production by increasing their investment in slaves: "To sell cotton in order to buy Negroes--to make more cotton to buy more Negroes. . ." When cotton prices rose from their low of five cents a pound in 1844 to ten cents in 1850, planters threw everything they could into the occasion. Many came out extremely wealthy, and with their wealth came power.

rations
Food rations among the soldiers of the North and South were usually too few and too horrid for the average soldier's taste. Soldiers on the march received hard bread, salt pork or fresh meat, sugar, coffee, and salt. Their southern neighbors received the same, with the exception that corn meal often substituted for wheat flour. Meat was frequently unavailable or spoiled. In the South, transportation of rations seemed a common difficulty, with the result that many "Rebs" entered the battlefield hungry.

Republican Party
Clashes over the Missouri Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 brought an end to the Whig party. Some former Whigs, together with northern Democrats and so-called "free soilers," formed the Republican party in time to submit a presidential candidate in 1856. In 1860 their candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won. Many southerners believed that Republican victory would eventually result in the abolition of slavery, and the party's victory was among the factors contributing to the coming war.

Sanitary Commission
Established by citizens in 1861 to help the army care for the sick and their families. The commission provided more than one million nights' lodgings during the war. Many of its members received no pay, serving as nurses, inspectors, cooks, and teamsters in the organization's 7,000 aid societies. The commissions was able to raise as much as seven million dollars during the war.

sharecropper
Following the war, many former slaves remained in the South, not always out of a desire to be there, but out of lack of real alternatives. These freed men and women often continued to work on plantations as sharecroppers. Their pay, which was a share of the crop, was usually barely enough for them to survive. Economically, politically, and socially, they were strapped to the status quo.

States' Rights
The concept of states' rights owes much to South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who expressed its logic most forcefully in the years between 1830 and 1850. States' rightists claimed that (southern) states had a right to secede from a Union whose actions no longer served their sovereign interests, and to which they no longer wished to belong. Moreover, they believed the states exempt from interference by a federal government.

subordinate
A person of lower class or rank. The military was and still is an institution of ranks and hierarchies designed to instill a sense of obedience and duty in its men. For an army to be effective and professional, its soldiers have to be willing to receive orders without question or doubt.

traitor
A person guilty of committing an act of treason. Traitors discovered during the war were tried and often executed, and deserters were counted among traitors. Jefferson Davis, too, was charged as a traitor, but released from prison after two years and not returned to trial.

unification
The state of being unified and undivided. Grant's primary objective as president was to unify the country and heal the wounds of its divisive war.

volunteer
Men who joined the armies of the Union and the Confederates were known as volunteers. They stood in contrast to conscripts, who were drafted into service. Some soldiers complained that conscripts lacked morale and obedience in comparison to their more zealous counterparts.

West Virginia
Residents of western Virginia were opposed to their state's secession the moment it was official. The Union's first military campaigns placed western Virginia securely within the North. In 1862, West Virginia was organized as a state, and was admitted to the Union in June of 1863.