Abraham lincoln
Abraham Lincoln(1809-1865) was the sixteenth president of the United States. Before being elected president, Lincoln served in the Illinois legislature. He also lost an election for the U.S. Senate to Stephen A. Douglas, but his strong campaigning earned him a nomination for the presidency. He was first Republican president ever. He declared South Carolina's secession illegal and decided in favor of war, to protect the federal union in 1861. During the four years of the American Civil War, he showed the North to victory and authored the Emancipation Proclamation, effectively ending slavery. He moved the nation with his Gettysburg Address, in which he related the ongoing Civil War to the founding principles of America. He was assassinated on 14 April 1865.
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Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) was the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. He had a career in national politics as Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce, and served as a congressman as well as a Mississippi senator. After the South's defeat in the Civil War, his citizenship was taken and he fled to Europe, only returning to the United States when a treason case against him was dropped. He died in New Orleans in 1889, and Congress reinstated his American citizenship in 1978. He did not have as much power over the people as president as Lincoln did in the Union but served as almost the entire cabinet.
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Robert E. lee
Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) was one of the most talented and successful generals of the Civil War. He graduated from West Point in 1846, and later, Lee fought in the Mexican-American war, where he proved himself. In 1859, he was in charge of the group that captured abolitionist John Brown at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. He was against secession, and declined Lincoln's offer to command the Union Army, instead staying home in Virginia. He commanded the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia until his surrender to General Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. He used brilliant and aggressive tactics to defeat his enemies.he did very well at Chancellorsville but his loss at Gettysburg negated his positives. Lee is still remembered as a great hero of the southern cause.
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Ulysses s. grant
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) served as commander in chief of the Union army during the Civil War, leading the North to victory over the Confederacy. Grant later became the eighteenth President of the United States, serving from 1869-77. After fighting in the Mexican-American War he left the army, only to rejoin at the outbreak of the Civil War. His victories at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Vicksburg and Chattanooga, brought him to the public eye and convinced Lincoln to promote him to head all Union armies. During the war, he was the only Union general who could equal southern general Robert E. Lee. After a bloody campaign in Virginia, Grant accepted Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender on 9 April 1865.
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Harriet Beecher stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was an American abolitionist and novelist who wrote Uncle Tom's House, one of the most influential books in American history. After the death of one of her children made her contemplate the pain slaves must endure when family members are sold away, she decided to write a book about slavery. With the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, she became a national celebrity, and went on to write several more books on the topic, many of them in response to southern critiques of the original. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin brought the issue of slavery home to millions of Americans. The story, helped galvanize the abolitionist movement, is a dramatic portrayal of the pain and heartbreak suffered by slaves throughout the South, and some people believed that much of the sectional strife following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was due to Stowe's influence. While Uncle Tom's Cabin did not start the war, it did bring into focus the severe brutality of slavery, and contributed to the divide growing between the North from the South during the crucial decade of the 1850s.
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