During the Texas Revolution, Mexican General Santa Anna laid siege to the Alamo Mission for a period of 13 days before finally launching an attack killing all of the Texian defenders.  "Remember the Alamo" became a rallying cry for the Texians inspiring their eventual victory over the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto.

The Missouri Compromise stated that Missouri would be admitted as a slave state and Maine would be admitted as free in order to keep a balance between states. It also stated that new states admitted out of the Louisiana Purchase would be free if they were north of the Southern border of Missouri.

Franklin Roosevelt. The agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission were created out of the New Deal legislation during FDR’s presidency.

The Emancipation Proclamation only abolished slavery in territories currently held by the Confederacy, and would free those slaves when the territories were conquered by the Union army, and was issued in the middle of the war on New Year’s 1863.  The Proclamation’s lack of attention to the Border Slave States necessitated the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery throughout the nation, in 1865.

In his initial Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln specifically made slaves free only in territories that were still in open rebellion against the Union. The primary reason for doing so was Lincoln's pragmatic desire not to alienate those slave-owning territories and individuals that were fighting on behalf of the Union. However, the issuing of the Proclamation set the cause in motion and with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, at the end of the war, slavery was declared unconstitutional in all United States territory. 

In December of 1860, following the election of Abraham Lincoln, the governing body of South Carolina voted unanimously for secession. Soon after, in early 1861, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, Lousiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee followed suit. Secession recieved the majority of popular support in the states of Missouri and Kentucky, but their pro-Union governments prevented this from happening. Lincoln declared the secession legally "void" and thus began the Civil War. 

Henry Clay’s American System was a wide ranging economic plan developed and advocated by Clay throughout the 1820s while he was a member of the House of Representatives and the Senate.  The key features were attempts to actively promote economic activities through raising revenues with tariffs and land prices, and economic improvements like the Bank of the United States and building canals and railroads.

 Four slave states remained in the Union during the secession crisis of 1860-1861, all of which were the most northern states.  The deep south states were the first states to secede, but Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware all remained in the Union despite being slave states.

The plot to assassinate Lincoln was a broad plan by John Wilkes Booth to destabilize the Federal government and rally the fading Confederate cause after Lee's Surrender.  Booth himself planned to kill both Lincoln and Grant at the same time, while he sent co-conspirators to kill Secretary of State Seward and Vice President Johnson.  Lincoln ended up being the only person killed in the plot, while Seward was severely injured in a knife attack.

Before the Civil War, Jefferson Davis served as a Congressman for the state of Mississippi, and, initially opposed secession from the Union. However, once the Confederate States were formed he was elected without opposition to the position of President. It was an office he would serve for the entirety of the existence of the Confederate States. Historians generally agree that Davis was an ineffectual war-time leader and credit his limited economic understanding with the rapid inflation and impoverishment experienced in the South during the Civil War. Immediately following the war Davis was widely disgraced and disparaged, however in the years since he has regained something of an iconic status among many Southerners, who revere his defiance and war-time spirit.