4-6.5

It Is Essential For Students To Know:

• The roles and accomplishments of key figures in the Civil War were important because they significantly affected the outcome of the war and the preservation of the Union.
• Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth President of the United States in 1860.
• Lincoln was against the expansion of slavery to the territories, but he was not an abolitionist. When Lincoln was elected, the South seceded from the Union. Lincoln was determined to preserve the Union. As president, he was also the commander-in-chief of the Union Army so it was his responsibility to name the commanders in the field. He changed generals frequently before he found Ulysses S Grant.
• In 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring all slaves in the Confederate states to be free.
• He honored all the soldiers who lost their lives in the war in the Gettysburg address.
• Lincoln was assassinated shortly after the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.
• Ulysses S. Grant was a general in the Union Army. When the Civil War began, the Union Army was weak and lost many battles. Grant won the Battle of Vicksburg that split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River and was then named as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Under Grant’s leadership, the Union Army employed a new strategy of total war. He accepted the surrender of Confederate troops under Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse. [April 1865]
• Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederate States of America and also commander-in chief of the Confederate Army. Davis did not need to look for a good general; Robert E. Lee soon assumed the leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia. However, Davis had little power because the Confederate states believed in states’ rights.
• Robert E. Lee was the leader of the Army of Northern Virginia in the Confederate Army. General Lee led his army to victory in many battles at the beginning of the Civil War using tried and true strategies. At Gettysburg, Lee ordered a frontal assault on Union lines and many of his soldiers were killed as a result of the accuracy of the new rifles. As the war progressed, the Union Army killed so many Confederate soldiers that his army was almost destroyed, particularly at Gettysburg.
• Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. .

It Is Not Essential For Students To Know:

• It is not essential for students to know the life history of these men or the soldiers who fought under them.