John Brown
Brown was an active (and aggressive) Northern abolitionist. He alongside other irate Northerners contributed to the onslaught of violence produced in the Bleeding Kansas conflicts by brutally brawling pro-slavery citizens at Pottawatomie. Several years later, Brown once again joined anti-slavery escapades in an attempt to stir up a slave revolt at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. As a result of his extreme actions during the raid, he was lynched soon after the raid.
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Jefferson Davis
Davis is infamous for being the only Confederate President to exist. He assisted in the forming of the Confederacy shortly after resigning from his position in the U.S. Senate. Due to his poor leadership and lack of political expertise, Davis constantly struggled to completely unify the South.
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Stephen Douglas
Douglas served as a Democratic senator in Illinois before becoming a presidential candidate who ran against Lincoln. He advocated for the Kansas-Nebraska Act for the sake of establishing transcontinental railroad systems in the North. Although the most popular Democrat in the presidential race, Douglas did not garner much support from the South because of his refusal to accept the Lecompton Constitution, a document which would have made Kansas a slave state.
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Robert E. Lee
Lee is widely considered to be the finest general to have participated in the Civil War. So fine, in fact, he was usually referenced as the "Marble Model". While Lincoln had sincerely offered him a position in the Union army, Lee declined for the sake of standing in arms with his birth-state of Virginia, despite not supporting slavery in any form. As the North began sporting a high advantage in the war, Lee represented the South at the surrender of Appotmattox Court House.
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Abraham Lincoln
From a lawyer raised in Illinois to the president of the Union, Abraham Lincoln is forever acknowledged as one of the most revered leaders of the United States of America. A Republican at heart and a strong believer in the abolition of slavery, his election caused South Carolina to detach itself from the nation. Lincoln is well-known for his Emancipation Proclamation, a document realizing Southern black slaves as free, and his Gettysburg address. He was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth shortly after the war.
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William Tecumseh Sherman
Besides being a close comrade of Ulysses S. Grant in the war, Sherman was also a famous general. One of his largest accomplishments in combat was backing Southern troops into the city of Atlanta through incessant use of total war tactics. This was later know as Sherman's "March to the Sea".
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
Stowe debuted her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin 10 years preceding the Civil War. This book had a large influence on the views of future abolitionists. Of course, many Southerns became outraged at how Stowe perceived slave farms. Her literary work directly imposed premonitions of war into the American atmosphere. She was even described as "the little lady who made this big war" by Lincoln.
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Charles Sumner
Sumner was a senator hailing from Massachusetts who held a strong belief in the liberation of all slaves. He was severely beaten by a mob after vocalizing his anti-slavery opinions during the events of Bleed Kansas. He eventually became a leader of the Radical Republicans during the Civil War.
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