This year marks the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the beginning of the American Civil War on April 12, 1861, the date when Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. Nebraska was then a U.S. territory, whose creation in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Act had been a major factor leading up to war. The act gave Southerners the right to take their slaves into new territories located west of the Missouri River, a part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase where slavery had previously been prohibited. Northern outrage over the prospect that slavery might spread into the West sparked the rise of the new Republican Party, which was determined to resist slavery’s extension. The 1860 election of Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln to the presidency prompted South Carolina, and soon ten other slave-holding states of the Deep South, to leave the Union and form the Confederate States of America.
Serving the communities of: Cozad-Lexington-Gothenburg-Eustis-Farnam-Elwood
