MSTEP Social Studies Practice Test

The main idea is identifying the leader who guided the United States through the Civil War and moved to end slavery, who was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. That person is Abraham Lincoln. He led the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, signaling freedom for enslaved people in Confederate areas and laying the groundwork for the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 by Booth. The other figures either weren’t the wartime leader who pushed emancipation, or aren’t associated with Booth’s assassination. George Washington predates the Civil War era, Ulysses S. Grant was a general and later president but not the one who issued emancipation, and Andrew Johnson was Lincoln’s successor and not the actor behind emancipation policy.