Who were the key players involved?

John Brown

Brown moved to Kansas with his family in the mid-1850s to prevent the territory from becoming a slave state. In 1856, he and a band of vigilantes helped spark the Bleeding Kansas crisis when they slaughtered five border ruffians at the Pottawatomie Massacre. Three years later, Brown led another group of men in the Harpers Ferry Raid to incite a slave rebellion. He was captured during the raid and hanged shortly before the election of 1860. Brown's death was cheered in the South but mourned in the North.

Jefferson Davis

A former Senator from Mississippi who was selected as the first president of the Confederacy in 1861. Overworked and underappreciated by his fellow Confederates, Davis struggled throughout the Civil War to unify the Southern states under the central government they had established.

Stephen Douglas

An influential Democratic senator and presidential candidate from Illinois. Although Douglas was the most popular Democrat, Southern party members refused to nominate him for the presidency in 1860 because he had rejected the Lecompton Constitution to make Kansas a slave state. As a result, the party split: Northern Democrats nominated Douglas, while Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge. In the election of 1860, Douglas toured the country in an effort to save the Union.

Robert E. Lee

Arguably the most brilliant general in the U.S. Army in 1860, who turned down Abraham Lincoln's offer to command the Union forces in favor of commanding the Army of Northern Virginia for the Confederacy. Although Lee loved the United States, he felt he had to stand by his native state of Virginia. His defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg proved to be the turning point in the war in favor of the North. Lee made the Confederacy's unconditional surrender at Appomattox Courthouse to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865 to end the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln

A former lawyer from Illinois who became the sixteenth president of the United States in the election of 1860. Because Lincoln was a Republican and was associated with the abolitionist cause, his election prompted South Carolina to secede from the Union. Lincoln, who believed that the states had never truly left the Union legally, fought the war until the South surrendered unconditionally. During the war, in 1863, Lincoln issued the largely symbolic Emancipation Proclamation to free all slaves in the South. Just at the war's end, in April 1865, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Washington, D.C.