Civil War vocabulary: 18 terms with definitions

The states that stayed loyal to the United States government during the Civil War.

The 11 Southern states that left the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.

States leaving the Union; South Carolina was the first, in December 1860.

The movement to end slavery.

Freedom from slavery; Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863.

A town in Pennsylvania where the Union won a major battle in July 1863; Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address there that November.

A Mississippi River city that surrendered to Union forces on July 4, 1863, after a long siege, giving the Union control of the river.

The village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, where Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865.

Giving up to an enemy; Lee's surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 ended the main fighting of the war.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President, who led the Union through the war and was assassinated in April 1865.

Ulysses S. Grant, the general who led the Union armies to victory and later became the 18th President.

William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general who captured Atlanta in 1864 and led the March to the Sea.

Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and became a leading writer and speaker against it.

Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery, led others to freedom on the Underground Railroad and served the Union Army as a scout and spy.

A system in which people were owned by others and forced to work without pay or freedom.

A change to the Constitution; the 13th Amendment ended slavery in 1865, and the 14th and 15th followed during Reconstruction.

People freed from slavery; the Freedmen's Bureau, set up in 1865, helped them with food, schools and work.

The years from 1865 to 1877, when the Southern states were rebuilt and brought back into the Union.