For more than 80 years, people in the Northern and Southern states had been debating the issues that ultimately led to war: economic policies and practices, cultural values, the extent and reach of the Federal government, and, most importantly, the role of slavery within American society.

Lincoln, aware of the public's growing support of abolition, issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring that all slaves in areas still in rebellion were, in the eyes of the federal government, free.

Kentucky at the Start of the Civil War At the outset of Civil War, shortly after the fighting at Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April 1861, Kentucky's state legislature officially declared its neutrality. Kentucky did not officially align itself with the Union, nor did it secede to join the Confederate States.

The Union included the states of Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, California, Nevada, and Oregon. Abraham Lincoln was their President.

The document specifies several reasons for secession, including its solidarity with its "sister slave-holding States," the U.S. government's inability to prevent Indian attacks, slave-stealing raids, and other border-crossing acts of banditry.

The American Civil War was fought between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, a collection of eleven southern states that left the Union in 1860 and 1861. The conflict began primarily as a result of the long-standing disagreement over the institution of slavery.

Mason-Dixon Line, also called Mason and Dixon Line, originally the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania in the United States. In the pre-Civil War period it was regarded, together with the Ohio River, as the dividing line between slave states south of it and free-soil states north of it.